The so-called Volker Rule for policing (ha!) banking practices, approved by a huddle of federal regulating agency chiefs last week, is the latest joke that America has played on itself in what is becoming the greatest national self-punking exercise in world history.

First of all (and there’s a lot of all), this rule comes in the form of nearly 1,000 pages of incomprehensible legalese embedded in what was already a morbidly obese Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform (ha!) and Consumer Protection (ha!) Act of 2012 that clocked in at 2000 pages, not counting the immense rafts of mandated interpretations and adumbrations, of which the new Volker Rule is but one. These additions were required because the Dodd-Frank Act itself did not really spell out the particulars of enforcement but rather left it to the regulatory agencies to construct the rules — which they did with “help” of lobbyist-lawyers furnished by the banks themselves. That is, the lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity? Well, this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense.

The Volker Rule was a lame gesture toward restoring the heart of the Glass-Steagall provisions of the Banking Act of 1933, which were repealed in 1999 in a cynical effort led by Wall Street uber-grifter Robert Rubin and his sidekick Larry Summers, who served serially as US Treasury Secretaries under Bill Clinton. Glass Steagall was passed in Congress following revelations of gross misconduct among bankers leading up to the stock market crash of 1929. The main thrust of Glass Steagall was to mandate the separation of commercial banking (deposit accounts + lending) from investment banking (underwriting and trading in securities). The idea was to prevent banks from using money in customer deposit accounts to gamble in stocks and other speculative instruments. This rule was designed to work hand-in-hand with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), also created in 1933, to backstop the accounts of ordinary citizens in commercial banks. The initial backstop limits were very modest: $2,500 at inception, and didn’t rise above $40,000 until 1980. Investment banks, on the other hand, were not backstopped at all under Glass-Steagall, since their activities were construed as a form of high-toned gambling.

The Glass Steagall Act of 1933 was about 35 pages long, written in language that was precise, clear, and succinct. It worked for 66 years. Banking during those years was a pretty boring business, commercial banking especially. It operated on the 3-6-3 principle — pay 3 percent interest on deposits, lend at 6 percent, and be out on the golf course at 3 p.m. Bankers made a nice living but nothing like the obscene racketeering profits engineered by the looting operations of today. Before 1980, the finance sector of the economy was about 5 percent of all activity. Its purpose was to allocate precious capital to new productive ventures.

As American manufacturing was surrendered to other countries, there were fewer productive ventures for capital to be directed into. What remained was real estate development (a.k.a. suburban sprawl) and finance, which was the enabler of it. Finance ballooned to 40 percent of the US economy and the American landscape got trashed. The computer revolution of the 1990s stimulated tremendous “innovation” in financial activities. Much of that innovation turned out to be new species of swindles and frauds. Now you understand the history of the so-called “housing bubble” and the crash of 2008. The US never recovered from it, and all the rescue attempts in the form of bail-outs, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, have turned into rackets aimed at papering-over this national failure to thrive. It is all ultimately linked to the larger story of industrialism and its relationship with the unique, finite, fossil fuel resources that the human race got cheaply for a few hundred years. That story is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.

The absurdity of Dodd-Frank and the Volker Rule in the face of that is just another symptom of that tragic inattention. The baroque prolixity of these statutes must have been fun for the lawyers to construct — thousands of pages of incantatory nonsense aimed at confounding any attempt to enforce decent conduct among bankers and their supposed regulators — but it does nothing to really help us move into the next phase of history.

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

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There is an ongoing revolutionary movement in this country. The revolution is a one sided revolution waged by the 1 percent against the 99 percent. Huxley called it the Ultimate Revolution: http://youtu.be/jWY2hKmLRHo

“What remained was real estate development (a.k.a. suburban sprawl) and finance, which was the enabler of it. Finance ballooned to 40 percent of the US economy and the American landscape got trashed.” There is a reason why Finance and Real Estate are lumped together with Insurance to compose FIRE, the largest sector of the U.S. economy. At that size, it can burn really hot and melt things down.

I haven’t had much to say about FIRE since I noted that the Dow went over 16,000 and the S&P500 went over 1800, with the NASDAQ joining them at over 4,000. I should probably note that the Dow actually hit a new real high this month, higher in real terms than its 2000 peak. I take that as a sign that this time, the bull is about ready to go to the slaughterhouse–but what do I know? I’ve been calling for that since March.

In other news, last week K-Dog mentioned the NSA spying on gamers. I thought K-Dog had turned into K-Cat and gotten into the catnip. It turned out he was right. “No Such Agency” really was infiltrating virtual worlds to see what the elves and dwarves were doing. That revelation came after the National Reconnaissance Office launched a satellite with an octopus logo that stoked people’s paranoia. IMHO, that was a reaction to the hype and symbolism, not the reality.

What further revelations are in store? Might it be disclosed that Government trolls from the Department of Defense network have been infiltrating blogs to leave childish off-topic comments to derail intellectual discourse and subvert the democratic process? Could their be an active program to suppress dissent and push status-quo ideology onto an unsuspecting public?

Could the rubes-be-conned and national dialog be pushed in a direction that only perpetuates corporate rule? If corporations are controlling the government via lobbyists and if corporate executives get fat government appointments what else may be going on? The rabbit hole outside the revolving door between the government and corporate America may be deeper than we know!

Edward Snowden’s documents may be revealing more than just interaction with the American Public through video games.

Stranger things have happened and time will tell. I just hope somebody cares and apathy does not continue to rule the day. It appears America likes being punked.

Senator Dodd ended up with a sweet gig lobbying for the Hollywood studios in DC; salary about $1 million a year. He did alright for himself. As for Barney Frank, just last week I heard him claim he has no responsibility for the FannyMae Debacle in 2008, even tho he was sleeping with one of the Directors, Herb Moses, and defended it up until the day it went under. Last I heard about Frank is that he was out in PTown, wearing assless chaps, cruising for a date.

We get only the best people in public office here in the US. You can read about them in a new book, ‘This Town’, by NYTimes writer Mark Leftowicz.

@janos, the righteous stand before the wicked and fallen alike, but their words alone justify them. do not the rabble cease their nettlesome chatter as the lamb is slaughtered, peering diligently among themselves for the first blooding? so too the writers of financial regulation and discipline do contend with base urges of the money-changers, men who lay upon the ground with goats and swine. if it is the word of the god then there be it inscrutable to you!

yeah well, it’s difficult to be completely PC isn’t it? even your reply could be parsed to be unacceptable, after all you used the F-word, what a bad boy you are.

however, who cares? not me.

what i find interesting is that with just a bit of searching this claim about the good senator is 100% true. Frank gave interviews at the time stating that he was in a relationship with this man, and they were all over the cocktail circuit together.

that Frank did not recuse himself from anything to do with Fannie Mae is just another indication of the corruption of our political and financial system.

and yes, you may not like the way the message is delivered, but a few clicks and you will find that it is true.

of course i could make the obligatory point that all these people’s “education” is tailored to serve the existing power structure, which it is; but then isn’t that the way with all failing civilizations? a bunch of people running around claiming to be important until it all falls down and someone else gets hurt?”

I just had dinner with a friend. By trade, she’s an insurance agent. She was relating how offended she was by some other friends of hers who padded a home insurance claim (not her company). She said they had no embarrassment about it at all—they were even gleeful! Well, I was shocked, shocked! (ha ha) I told her essentially the same thing James says here: the whole country is lawless, on the take, and anything goes. When people see this in their government, huge corporations, and smaller businesses, many of them conclude: why should I play by the rules? Only chumps do that!

Speaking of Theater of the Absurd, news just broke that one John C. Beale has been arrested for massive government fraud. Apparently a card-carrying sociopath, Beale is responsible for the theft of hundreds of thousands of Federal tax dollars. Additionally, it was revealed that he hasn’t shown up for an honest day’s work in over a year.

Oh, and one more detail…he’s a director of the Environmental Protection Agency – in charge of those departments monitoring climate change and air pollution.

Yup, Beale was the EPAs ‘Climate Change Expert’, at $206,000 per year. Hell, the principal at our local high school makes more than that. Really Greg, as Govt. scammers go, this guy is small potatos.

I tell my young relatives (as if they listen): Don’t bother trying to start a business. No, get yourself a Government Job. That’s where the good pay, generous benefits, long paid vacations, job security and early retirement is. Which do you want to be, the poor sucker trying to start a business against all odds … while being hounded to death by OSHA, IRS, EPA, Labor, FAA (if you are shipping anything) and a dozen agencies, federal, state and city, with armies of ballbusting regulators, each carrying a book of pettifogging rules and regulations thick as the NYC phonebook, and backed up by agency SWAT teams, coming down on you … or do you want to be the feared apperatchik, with a badge and a gun, licensed to bust the balls of that poor sap running a business, and see him tremble with fear before you? Its not even a fair question.

[That is, the lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity?]

as a corporate refugee (eg, someone paid to go the f*ck away forever) i’m less incredulous than kunstler about our nation’s incestuous governmental-industrial complexities. imho, at some point there’s a fundamental shortage of smart people, eg, men and women who can get the job done; so often the big financial organizations have cornered the market on people who know what the f*ck is going on, and the world has no choice but to play ball with them, unless they want to rely on a crowd of well-meaning ignoramuses.

the stock market crash of 1987 (i believe that was the year: you can look it up) is a case in point: it was a huge event, not the least of which from a data analysis point of view. the regulatory authorities appealed to ibm to make sense of it all: it was the only one that could. obviously there was a huge conflict of interest, since big blue’s stock itself had led the rats of the dow straight down, but once again, more often than not the private sector has the intellectual firepower to do what the feds cannot.

contrary to congressional belief, goldman sachs does not do god’s work. but if a raft of exotic paper goes belly up tomorrow, i’d rather have goldman on the case than god himself. after all, i’ve heard that the almighty can’t even type.

“The lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity? “

No it does not. The slickest marketing campaign in history put Mr. Obama in the oval office and congressional races are all now won by corporate campaign donations. Our supreme court has become a rubber stamp for corporate rule. At this point anybody who’s credibility is strained has been living under a rock and the American public drowns under a sea of apathy and deceit.

Will this move us along to the next phase in history; absolutely. But not in any direction that is going to be good for America.

yeah, I remember crowing to my brother about how we finally got rid of the idiot, and elected a black guy to boot…he said bullshit we ‘elected’ him; there is just no WAY the American public would have stood for another republican after bush- just you wait, he said, and watch this motherfucker: well, at least imnotsoho, we have been scrudenfuct…I sure don’t buy the demrep dichotomy any more!

It is all ultimately linked to the larger story of industrialism and its relationship with the unique, finite, fossil fuel resources that the human race got cheaply for a few hundred years. That story is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.

no so, mr kunstler, there are several hundred million solar panels, wind farms, biogas facilities, hydroplants etc. up and running and helping out very nicely, see Germany et al

the fact that they exist at all is because people are paying attention to the reality of ‘it’

the fact that you deem the entire globe to be engaging in a futile alt energy fantasy indicates just how wrong your central tenet of energy descent is – much akin to your conveniently hushed up predictions of dow 4,000

Solar has done very little for Germany’s energy supply. Yes solar panels are getting better and better at generating intermittent electricity. But it’s still intermittent, and that makes it still nearly useless in replacing fossil fuels to any meaningful degree. Perhaps it has some potential in hot sunny climates, but even there, the solar supply profile doesn’t completely match the peak demand profile.

With massive govt subsidies, you can build a lot of solar installations. That does not mean those installations are doing anything significant in meeting a country’s energy needs.

Germany’s energy strategy is going to lead it to rely heavily on buying nuclear-generated power from France.

They can power all the needs of a suburban home during the day and store excess power in some kind of battery cell.

Renewable energy is for the conservationist. So people aren’t going to be wasting energy on nonessential activities. Having lights at night is essential, watching television for 4 hours isn’t essential.
Most of the people with the solar panels in Germany are rural farmers. Rural living doesn’t equal “going medieval”, they’re the first to hop onboard the latest and greatest tech innovations.

JHK may be too pessimistic about the potential of renewable energy, but he’s right on the money (so to speak) about the rackets that “banks” now run.

Go into any bank and chat up an employee. Soon they’ll be telling you about business at their “store.” That’s right. Not “branch” but “store.”

I miss the old days of 3% interest on savings that got invested locally in local firms. Repealing Glass-Steagall was one of the worst financial decisions of the past 50 years. I want my old boring neighborhood bank back, with a branch manager who lived in the next (and nicer) neighborhood and who drove an Olds or maybe even a Caddie.

The masters of the universe from Wall Street have wrecked that old way of life, and replaced it with an economy built on illusions, where banks are money-stores for “money” that only exists, as JHK might say, notionally.

I have read analyses of the Glass Steagall issue that question whether its repeal played much role in the financial meltdown of 2008.

The argument goes: Glass Steagall separated the banking and stock brokerage businesses. However, the financial services companies that in 2008 were both in the banking and brokerage businesses typically were generating some genuine income from their brokerage businesses by making commissions, a rather low-risk and mundane element of the financial services sector. In contrast, the banking business was turning into a monster due to the slicing and dicing of mortgages into salads with a hefty spicing of toxic subprime dressing.

By that argument, the major abuse in the financial services sector that contributed heavily to the meltdown was not the commingling of banking and brokerage businesses but abuses within the banking business.

[In contrast, the banking business was turning into a monster due to the slicing and dicing of mortgages into salads with a hefty spicing of toxic subprime dressing.]

@isjogren — kudos for apt analysis. sounds like you’re well-read.

me being me, i have friends in low and high places alike; early on, circa the time i was sick in bed with serious-ass flu, a little bird let me know re countrywide financial, who’s systems were apparently thing of beauty. i got long but never got out, such is the story of my life.

i tell this story because of an element i feel you did not mention in your rehash of 2007 etc, that is, the exponential effect of scalable data systems on the finance industry especially. jhk mentions this “revolution” in this week’s piece.

in 2006 mr joe blow could buy an oracle server package for less than $twenty grand; now it’s half that. if an entrepreneur has a halfway workable business plan, eg, it can work for a while, he’s essentially off and running with less capital than it takes to buy a doublewide trailer. thus we have instant captains of industry like angelo mozilo et al, your basic used-car dealers smoking the same sh*t as lance armstrong.

in this respect, nothing has changed. i’m about to launch the money pump which will set the stars in disarray, i wrote the code in a weekend. next weekend i’m going to learn french.

@ajmuste, also, the wsj reports that credit quality has been improving year on year. we all have deadbeats living next door, but in general people are paying just like they’re supposed to. meanwhile, my local starbucks is flush with cash: two days in a row now, somebody’s bought me a round.

the thing is, america is a big country. you ever look out the window en route to cincinnati or some other godforsaken hub? there’s nothing but lights. factories, mines, prisons, houses laid out like bird shot thrown on a lumpy blanket. shapes i remember from maps. a baseball diamond.

@hammer — words of wisdom, words. of. wisdom. i have the same ontological misgivings re the injunction not to sleep with my neighbor’s wife… i mean, if nobody’s doing the neighborhood, doesn’t that mean we’re all forced to go to las vegas?

But we are not in Germany and nothing is being done to push Alternative energy in America. The Oil Lobby runs Washington and suppression of Alternative energy solutions that could get America back to work are simply not discussed.

Alternative energy will never allow the lifestyle the oil bubble has provided that is why Jim calls it a futile alt energy fantasy and he is right. Alternative energy could allow the human race to survive if it were not for government/corporate lackey types like you who sing lullabies, prevent change and encourage apathy.

The story of finite fossil fuels “is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.” You lie and claim solutions are actively being pursued and there is nothing to worry about when nothing more than lip service is given to our future.

Why do you do it? A paycheck? Please tell us why you do it if there is a decent bone in your body?

1) Not health care as we know it but we can still have some and relative to what everybody had a hundred years ago it could be closer to modern than not.

2) If there were a national program to build green homes we would essentially not need home heating. Such a program would employ a huge quantity of people’ Heat would be taken from the sun and stored in thermal mass to be released as needed. This technology is well developed and has been around since the 70’s. The need for home heating can be dramatically reduced.

3) We don’t absolutely need planes. Trains can be pretty efficient and if all electric cars were built using only existing technology lifestyles could be redesigned to deal with a fifty mile a day range. A remnant of modern life yes. The stone age no.

4) True, we need to have discussions on how to reduce population in a rational humane way. Having too many children simply can’t be allowed. This is a separate discussion and opens a huge can of worms so for the time being I’m not comfortable stating my ideas about this. At least in this comment anyway.

The most important thing is that lifestyles must change. We need new living arrangements but only a tiny minority; of which we are both a part, even admits this and much fewer are willing to make the life changes needed. But life will be better in the future if proactive action is taken now to deal with the reality of losing fossil fuels.

And what about incomes? Everyone makes the same, right? Wrong approach. Give everyone the same amount of Social Credit and then let the ambitious compete once everyone’s survival has been secured.

Once people are secure, they naturally have not too many kids. At least Whites and Asians anyway. But some say this has been seen even in parts of the 3rd World as they emerge into prosperity. Your angst may be for naught – here anyway. But since you don’t believe in the Nation State, there is no here, here.

in my humble opinion, the problem is not that other people have too many kids. it’s that they have sex at all.

other people having sex disgusts me. me having sex, now we’re talking epitome and apotheosis of interlocking destiny, of man become godlike, infinite and eternal. my partners often report that my sibilant succulence is as if i am in conversation with the cosmos, the music of the spheres.

sex is not mandatory for procreation, a functioning laboratory with competent technicians is a must. I don’t know how much of our laboratory work is dependent on a steady stream of oil.
Maybe all they need is 40 proof alcohol and a turkey baster?

If you mean that after the fossil fuel era there will be a small remnant of the human population that hangs on, albeit at a quasi stone-age standard of living in most respects, then I would say, yes, if that’s what you mean then I retract my first statement and concur with you.

I’ll give you that but there is no absolute evidence to say it is not true either.

This gets into the realm of opinion and I happen to think alternative energy is a good idea. By saying there is no evidence to back up that statement you must feel that the human race is doomed because if the human race is going to survive my statement becomes moot.

Perhaps you prefer:

If the human race survives alternative energy can help it survive.

In which case the pursuit of alternative energy is a good thing. I should clarify that I only consider alternative energies which are green. A standard of living with a green alternative energy infrastructure means that we don’t have to descend all the way to a quasi stone-age level!

Brazil gets 85% of ALL its electricity production from hydroelectric sources.

Brazil produces lots and lots of ethanol to burn instead of gasoline.

Iceland gets 100% of its power from hydroelectric power and has only developed 10% or so of its potential.

Just two examples that have beaten the fossil fuel beast.

Pray tell how the hell are we going back to semi stone age with this type of firepower being harnessed?

Note – these are real world examples.

You lie and claim solutions are actively being pursued and there is nothing to worry about when nothing more than lip service is given to our future.

once again kdog just spews invective – “you lie”.

kdog is incapable of digesting success. he’s now going to wail about how we’re paid operatives and it’s all a conspiracy and speak in generalities that get us nowhere, i.e. ‘lip service’ is merely paid to our future (wholly disregarding the past 40 years of alt energy progress).

what a surprise.

once again, iceland and brazil are energy independent because of hydroelectricity/ethanol.

we salute you as we pass you off, showing you real world examples of abundance and technology making our lives better.

This is the age of strange bedfellows, without a doubt. Jimbo, your gardening exploits, and paintings really fill out the appeal of this website for me. Best wishes for a medico-free horizon, and Merry Christmas.

The lawyers are not just having fun, they are making a ton of money by making things so complicated that only they can figure things out, the regulators write the rules then go out and work for the industries that they regulated, making themselves rich.

“… the lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity? Well, this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense. -JHK

Well, I see nothing to raise a bone of contention with in this bold outline of sanctioned corruption.

The Conner-of-Rubes would do well to know his place in the strata of this current kerfuffle and Candied Clusterfuck and bear in mind that he’s overmatched by those who take in millions for their expertise and obfuscation (that I’m sure they feel they’re due). Now stick to the subject at hand; boring as it may be, it could prove the ultimate in suicidal gambits by the perpetuators of the status quo and business as usual. Letters of credit, not techno-miracles, are what make the [present] world go ’round…..

Let’s take a look at a bit of this continuum, shall we?

“Fischer wouldn’t be the first central bank governor to change countries. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney was governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 until last June. ”

“Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Greg Mankiw, who headed President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, also studied under Fischer. ”

(Please attempt staying with the topic for at least a 24 hour period. Thanks. I say this because if one does, one might surmise who the punk’ers and the punk’d might be. The “policies”, of the punk’ers that affect us [the punk’d] are not in our interest, nor are they meant to be. In a cold analysis, we’re all quite disposable integers in their calculations.)

The best and brightest, the craven and clueless and the dumb and dastardly.

But that definition of insanity is applying more to us than them. They get what they want and then they get more. Daily double dips of sorbet and sherbet for them. The insanity is not on them but on the faint of freedom who revere and respect their sham sagacity and dole and dip to their demands want of wisdom. In a land brimming with brilliance we prefer being pranced and paraded across a lake of ever thinning ice by a flock of fools.

Perhaps it’s time to go ahead and make the word Punk synonymous with Bank the way bankster is with banker. With names like Punk of America and Citipunk the message may ring a little clearer. It’s time to cut out the BSness as use-you-all.

If there is any truth to your contention that Asoka is still operating at this site and doing so, possibly, under multiple monikers, I agree firstly that Rube-I-con’s pet themes closely resemble Asoka’s.

Secondly, I see in ajmuste’s upbeat take on things an adumbration (thanks for new word, Jim) of Asoka. Note that when I listed some former posters who I’d like to see return to CFN, ajmuste came back with some additions to the list that included Asoka, janet and Carol. Now I ask, who but Asoka would have added those three?!

To successfully pull off writing as two different personalities is no simple feat. Rube-I-con begins sentences with lower case letters while ajmuste uses the standard upper case. This is one small way in which one person may be made to appear as two.

There’s something that needs to be known here, and the idea that this even needs to be pointed out says something big.

There are, right now, in each of the chambers of the United States Congress, bills introduced that are very simple and succinct, that simply restore at least part of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933.

No news reports. No political chatter. Not a word from the President (who still sells the notion of “financial reform” of the Dodd-Frank dog and pony show entertainment diversion).

I vaguely recall reading something (maybe in one of the above linked pages) about one of these bills that included, as part of the information items, something about “estimated probability of passing”, and the chances for that bill were… no joke… 1%.

A lot of key words like “Glass Steagal” and “Detroit” have dropped off the radar of a lot of television news organizations. That’s how more people get their news than from any other source – television; according to the television ads.

If I really want to know more about anything, I’d have to do my own research and I don’t want to do that.

The elimination of Glass Steagall allowed the gamblers on the brokerage side to feast on the traditional banking side and set the traditional customers up as marks, i.e. creating mortgage lending scams and pooling those high-risk, no-doc loans into funds that were then partitioned and securitized and sold as low-risk investments after contracting egghead academic physicists to produce risk models using the same theories applied to cosmological and climate science models.

QE, it appears, was intended to keep the speculative bubble in play, and if you view it from that perspective and ignore the propaganda, you quickly see it accomplished that task quite well. LSAP since 2008 reduced the money multiplier from 9.3 to 3.1 indicating that the massive infusion of reserves has essentially been funding speculative activity. 81.5% of the money created by QE is not in circulation. That combined with the stark decrease in the money multiplier has stymied economic growth. They know this and yet have done it now for five years. Incompetence doesn’t explain it properly. The speculators are making a killing and yet they’re the ones who blackmailed the world in 2008 and claimed it would all come crashing down if they weren’t bailed out. It was all a cover to continue to completion the hollowing out. Did they kill the Golden Goose in the process? The next ten years will reveal that answer to anyone who has the intelligence to ask the question.

[The elimination of Glass Steagall allowed the gamblers on the brokerage side to feast on the traditional banking side and set the traditional customers up as marks, i.e. creating mortgage lending scams and pooling those high-risk, no-doc loans into funds that were then partitioned and securitized and sold as low-risk investments after contracting egghead academic physicists to produce risk models using the same theories applied to cosmological and climate science models.]

@lord baby — what the hell line of work are you in? you seem informed and you use verbs and nouns correctly, but unless i’m seriously out of it (always a possibility) you’re talking nonsense. there is no big money in brokerage, and surely brokerage was irrelevant to the 07 crash.

is not the money in debt? eg, bonds and their permutations. the wizardry which funneled sleepy mortgage debt into the bond-trading thunderdome is what killed us all, surely. but don’t blame that on the originators,,, they were simply the dogs wagging to voracious (including china) debt buyers, not the other way around.

fixed income seems the least sexy game when you’re an individual, because, after all, wouldn’t we grow for the future than settle for a present cashflow. on the world stage, though, debt is where the action is, because institutions don’t need to grow, they simply must flow.

I’m not talking nonsense, you’re quibbling over terminology. I used brokerage to describe speculative investment. I consider MBS and associated CDS speculative investment nurtured and derived from the traditional banking side, i.e. the mortgage lending side. Yes, you are correct, it is debt; brokered debt and highly speculative although sold as otherwise. Tangible value gets lost in the abstractions so when you have derivatives of derivatives, determining a value becomes a byzantine comedy. And the wolves love the obscurity unnecessary complexity provides.

@lord blaby – after a more careful read of your post i do concede that i bogged in terminology. still i cling to my thesis that the global collapse kicked of by lehman’s demise was such a strange trainwreck as to defy conventional explanation now.

am i correct to restate your position as a variant of jhk’s moral condemnation of money center recklessness? eg, that the freedom of easy (absent) regulation kicked off a wave of speculation by financial institutions motivated almost entirely by greed?

(so much of what people say here is lousy with the paranoia of powerlessness, driven by a theology of good and evil playing itself out in trillions of dollars.)

what i think: information technology was at the heart of it all, just as it will be central to the next global conflagration. imho, lots of irrational behavior can be explained as variations of one theme, that is, rapture of the deep, the maddeningly infinite power to compute beyond one’s wildest dreams.

by way of example, ask yourself, why would aig, a relatively sober life insurer, bet more than a hundred times its capital in credit default spreads — even if it had guessed right, what would have become of the organization, to net in one trade more than it had earned in its existence? this is not greed, it’s psychosis.

i contend that the aberrant behavior common nowadays — a highly regarded politician tweeting pictures of his package to unknown females, a presidential us general, carrying on with a high profile whore in gmail, traders jockeying for new jersey real estate, to shave milliseconds of executions — is not only dependent on modern i.t., it’s caused by it.

once again, any explanation that infers conspiracy, even among highly self-interested parties, tends to be wrong. conspiracy requires competence; that ingredient tends to be as rare as chickens’ lips.

If there is any truth to your contention that Asoka is still operating at this site and doing so, possibly, under multiple monikers, I agree firstly that Rube-I-con’s pet themes closely resemble Asoka’s.

kdog says he can track ip addresses. so that should fairly easily determine whether i am asoka, who i admired a bit, as i do janos a bit, for having the balls to say whut he thinks.

other than that, who the heck cares whether someone posts under two name, as long as theres factual debate that it touches off?

As many of you may already know, Clinton and his crew greased the skids for much of the 2008 crisis and W took the baton and ran with it. Obama is keeping the speculation going under the guise of reform (to include QE), just as Clinton greased the skids via the expansion of the CRA under the guise of reform. For all parties involved, it was a way to make a quick buck and line their pockets at the expense of a prosperous future for the rest of us. The CRA was signed into law during Carter’s tenure in 1977, but it was relatively benign and irrelevant until Clinton and his opportunistic hacks (Rubin and Summers) decided to significantly expand it, and because they were insiders were able to make a killing off of it and then have the U.S. taxpayers pay to make it whole when the risky investments failed. Make them whole to continue speculating was the purpose of the bailout. They can’t stop. It literally is like heroin.

True to form, the Obama Admin is taking steps to rejuvenate subprime lending via the CRA. Incredible. I don’t think it will work this time, meaning I don’t think they can blow an already burst bubble up again, but nothing at this point would surprise me. It’s magic.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps.

Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to do more to make sure more Americans can enjoy the benefits of the housing recovery, but critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars.

“If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from,” said Ed Pinto, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former top executive at mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

It certainly has been, Orion, but will it continue to be so? Yes, institutions flow until they evaporate, and institutions worldwide seem to be evaporating. Perhaps as a result of that, we will see the Great Rotation Bank of America’s Subramanian’s been touting. It will be interesting to see how ending QE affects his wishful prognostication. Sometimes when you build it (hype it) they don’t come, but if you’re skilled enough, they usually do, and in droves.

as an old man who tells the same story again and again at the slightest provocation, here i tell my bank story….

my grandmother’s father killed himself at the bottom of the great depression, leaving a wife and five daughters to fend for themselves. these were not ordinary women, however, they stuck the $50 grand payout in a bank in columbus, ohio, and went right on eating from garbage cans and begging for charity from the church. my grandmother was the shrewdest of the bunch, variously buying out and stabbing in the back all her blood relations; by the time she was seventy banc one was among the largest super-regionals; by the time she was dead everything was denominated in jpmorgan chase shares.

me and my cousins did that math, figuring we would live like royalty, but damned if she didn’t give the lion’s share to smith college. crumbs of crumbs nicely worked as the down payment for our first house.

i have no jpm and managed to get my parents out last summer. various relations act as if it’s a holy relic, which entails seeing jaime dimond as akin to baby jesus.

when i used to trade there were two sectors that rarely let me down, banking and tech. plus the best job i ever had was at barclays, i can’t say nothing bad about them, they paid a retainer never to work in finance again, i suppose that’s an insult, but still, it’s a check that never bounces.

i like bankers, the men more than women, although, goodness, they do hire clerical personnel who give such good phone. the bigshots mostly are honest: they literally do eight figure deals on a handshake, calling in the lawyers afterward, the way you call the janitor when someone throws up in school.

The unprosecutable–by a fully owned “government”–Wall Street mafia will cease to be a problem immediately after the first mass shooting that occurs in one of the Wall Street crime families’ office buildings. You know it is going to happen sooner or sooner…

in my humble opinion, gun enthusiasts are like those poor schlubbs who cut off their own balls by way of penance for crimes too monstrous to acknowledge, eg, gun nuts are hopeless materialists, mistaking their fetish for some kind of motive force in the world.

you disgust me.

take out all your weapons right now and lay em out on the the living room rug: what do we have here? for one thing, not enough ammo to withstand an afternoon’s siege, let alone stalingrad. for another, there are a few logistical issues, eg, who you gonna shoot, and who’s gonna care if you do? the guys on wall street are elderly, they’ve been aching to be dead a long time, they’d love to die with harness on. alternatively, you could take out an elementary school. there ya go. stand your ground,.

Nearing the end of 013 I have to ask the question, which institution and who among us will survive intact in 014?
Will Western Governmints remain in the same seemingly unassailable positions of World power, as in the past decades?

Looks like the walls of Wall St are beginning to crumble, few at the top of the heap can see their coming ride on the downfall and those who can are already trying to insure that they insulate themselves. Abolishing Glass Stegal certainly started pulling at the piles of the financial foundations, that and many other greed driven insanity’s have compounded the rot.
America once so full of positive promise, now in the negative position of having to operate in a secret, debt burdened smoke filled neo-circus, mirrored in fear, with an audience who are leaving in their droves, increasingly demanding their stake back.

Time for the PTB to create a diversion? These stakes are now so globally high, when the final cards are laid as they will be, there will be, yet again, millions of losers. But what of the winners? Will these 0.001% be able to survive going from disaster to tragedy to catastrophe. We certainly have had the first condition and seem to be well into the second. Can emerging into the third condition be diverted; how and by whom? I believe that unless the common man begins thinking and acting in an uncommon way, there will be no diversion, hence little or no pressure on the PTB and their immoral cohorts to change their ways and ergo —–.
J. H. points us to what may have to be, but is this a satisfactory scenario; should there remain a tiny minority who are living an entirely different way of life at the expense of the many and thereto still dictating the game? Metropolis writ large in a retrogressed agri suburbia is not my idea of an appealingly, free future. How to inspire, how to defy, how to transcend those that seem unassailable. Reminiscent of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, is to be;
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory

@ulaccs — thanks for the poetry, there’s surely not enough of it in this world.

but, because i’m feeling feisty… was not shelley supported by capitalist patrons? as a matter of fact i don’t know, but it seems to me that from ecclesiastes onward, artists have always existed at the whim of power. in some very indirect way jhk fits that charge… those college lecture halls which put food on his table, they have names like corzine and bronfman on their lintels.

do the rich truly burn wealth, or do they merely spread it around? i know a guitar maker who would be living on foodstamps were he not doing custom cabinetry for some lord of the universe. i ask myself, well, that’s not a good use of resources, to pay a hundred grand for a pretty kitchen some a$$hole is going to visit twice a year, but, still, it’s my friend who’s catching that particular sum as it comes trickling down.

jhk’s last post ended with the question, what is money. or perhaps the forlorn hope that we’ll find a new meaning for it. my answer is the scene from “catch me if you can,” when dicapprio is doing some supermodel who’s best known as the phoniest girls’ magazine cover to hit these shores… she’s a whore, he’s a counterfeiter, god is in his heaven and the lion sleeps tonight. in this particular transaction lies a monad of our new economy: sex for secrets, arms for hostages, life’s the quickest swapshop you’ll ever see.

first, the story: there’s this convenince store manager, running the minimart, he’s a young turk, he’s got all kinds of new ideas. so he contracts with a local bakery that’s known for it’s “nimbus” bread, so-called because it’s as light as a cloud. he starts selling pastrami subs on nimbus rolls and the money’s pouring in.

the convenience store association isn’t too pleased, this young guy selling non-standard items; he makes them look bad. worse, he also starts selling hair extensions, actual clumps of human hair that some women like to pin in their own hair. the hair, too, also sells well.

the big convenience store annual meeting is coming up and our hero knows there’s been dark talk of him packing odd inventory, but he figures he’ll clue everyone else into his supply line and all will be forgiven. however, as he walks to the podium he hears a chilling remark from the all powerful seven-eleven delegation. this is what he heard:

“….this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense.” …jhk…

This is true enough, JHK. Once could argue that this is more true for the upper echelons of US society than for the lower echelons – nevertheless, the point holds.

“The absurdity of Dodd-Frank and the Volker Rule in the face of that is just another symptom of that tragic inattention. (to peak oil issues) The baroque prolixity of these statutes must have been fun for the lawyers to construct — thousands of pages of incantatory nonsense aimed at confounding any attempt to enforce decent conduct among bankers and their supposed regulators — but it does nothing to really help us move into the next phase of history.”
….jhk….

You are one of the best at capturing the bizarre zeitgeist of the age in magnificent prose, JHK. And thanks for that. And thanks for your work, every single week. And thanks for this comment thread.

Now – there are some on this comment thread who say that they could quickly discuss (and presumably solve!) ALL problems – if only the racist/homophobic/whateverhaters would shut up and leave them to it.

Of course “things” (i.e. actions, people, ideas) matter (exist and have weight). However, no one has the ability to right laws that benefit everyone. They certainly don’t have the ability to legislate morality or enforce morality.

It’s up to individuals like JHK, you and I to determine how each of us should react to whatever is or is not happening.

I appreciate JHK’s work ethic and providing some modicum of free speech to the internet. However, like everywhere else, it’s becoming an experiment in totalitarianism. How much can one man tolerate?

“4) True, we need to have discussions on how to reduce population in a rational humane way. Having too many children simply can’t be allowed. This is a separate discussion and opens a huge can of worms so for the time being I’m not comfortable stating my ideas about this. At least in this comment anyway.” ….k-dog….

Yes, a tall tale as in a fiction or a fabrication. As JHK so often notes, the numbers are massaged with all manner of accounting chicanery, so unless you’re an insider, it’s difficult to determine the financial health of any company, although if you think about it, considering peak everything most if not all companies are going concerns yet so few going concern opinions are issued by the partner-in-crime accounting firms.

Otherwise, some of your points are well taken. My family of origin is still chugging along and doing quite well. They’re trying to plan a summer reunion at the Outer Banks in North Carolina. You should hear about all the conflicting plans that will most likely render the endeavor a no go. One of them has a summer full of trips and spending; Key West for a week and a half and Disney for a week with two grand children so young you could take them to a landfill and it would be equally entertaining and memorable for a fraction of the price, but Disney it will be for $5,000 Alex.

I don’t think debt has the stigma it once had. For example, it’s now been relabeled as credit and doesn’t that sound more pleasant? The renaming was purposeful social engineering and of course there are the ads that present your credit-worthiness as exemplified by your credit score as something to love and nurture like a child. Who cares if you pass from this plane of existence with a mountain of debt? It was never intended to be collected in it’s entirety anyway. It was always intended to keep you on the hamster wheel, and don’t think the strategy isn’t to enable us to carry that credit-worthiness into the next realm, if there is one, after we take the last breath of this existence. You hear about these children who act and talk like they’ve had a former life to the point they remember specific facts and details. Well, I’m waiting for one of them to remember that they have a huge mortgage payment to make. Once they do, I’ll know they’re the real deal and there’s something to this reincarnation thing.

Orionoir: If we are unworthy to touch the hems of Summers’ and Frank’s garments owing to their intellectual transcendence then why, since they and their ideological fellow travelers are the architects of the present economic status quo, are things so patently awry?

They may not be plain stupid people who mismanage subject and predicate but eloquence should not be taken for reality. I am reminded of a story about a law school exercise in which students are required to argue both sides of the same case. He who finds “the magic words” most wins twice.

Rube-i-con: Regarding German solar PV, Brazilian Hydro, and all other renewable sources of electrical power, I recommend considering what Nicole Foss has to say. Hydro is clearly the technology of choice but let’s face it: not every location on earth enjoys abundant waterways and exploitable elevation differentials. We admire what the Germans have accomplished with PV but bear in mind there is fossil energy embedded in the panels and power electronics, as well as batteries if used for grid energy storage for those moments when a cloud passes over. Ironically as the proportion of grid solar increases it does so at the expense (literally) of the legacy power sources and the price at the point of use must rise to sustain the system. This in addition to the power losses as the voltage must be transformed to transmission levels.

Given that there are more scientists and engineers working today than have ever existed there is reason for belief in the Deus Ex Machina version of the future. But perhaps in this case timing does matter: the path from where we are now with 24/7 electrical power in the wall switch and hot and cold potable water at the tap to a similar future powered via local renewables may be interrupted by the Hobbesian war of all against all. Or even more sinister, the same techno-geniuses who offer up bionic arms for the unfortunates defending US dollar hegemony can also craft robots designed to maintain the economic status quo, also known as law and order. Google bought Boston Dynamics this past Friday the 13th. Nothing to see here… move along.

[If we are unworthy to touch the hems of Summers’ and Frank’s garments owing to their intellectual transcendence then why, since they and their ideological fellow travelers are the architects of the present economic status quo, are things so patently awry?]

@florida power – well, things could be so much worse, no? blood in the streets, for example.

from what i read, larry summers is your basic pr!ck with ears, surely not a man any of us would want to be trapped in an elevator with. still, society needs leaders… am i right? just because leaders have historically been the scum of the earth, that doesn’t change our basic need for people who can stand up, speak their minds, define the problem, parse out the tasks, carrot and stick their way through the end of the day to get stuff done.

take bill clinton. and his wife, please. obama is the man with the silver tongue, and he will long be remembered for what he’s said, but as a supporter i’m mortified by his ineffectuality.

summers at harvard, there was no shortage of people who wanted him dead, mostly middle-aged women with serious attitudes. even someone like rubin at citi, it’s fair to despise the air he breathes. still, he made things move. that’s what i like about money: it gets people moving.

as for garments, who hems anything these days? it’s all wash & wear. my real complaint is when you get these epic battles, clash of the mental midgets, guys who can’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted them the ‘c’ and the ‘a,’ so full of vitriol for men who actually showed up and paid attention in fourth grade.

I think it’s been proven beyond a shadow of doubt that mass shootings don’t accomplish anything more than entertaining spectacle for the ADHD citizenry. They’re so ubiquitous these days, for me at least they conjure nothing more than a yawn if I notice at all. But still, the majority glue themselves to the details of the latest blood shedding. It enforces their indoctrinated perspective that the world is increasingly insane and they are one of the few sane people to inhabit it. In otherwords, it engenders fear, loathing and alienation and the only symptom alleviation for this chronic ailment is to buy more shit. Any kind of shit will do. Just keep buying even if it’s books that tell you how bad buying is for you and the world is about to end as a result of your hedonistic buying habits.

Hey Orionoir, how’s things out in Storrs, Emerald City? Pretty good?That’s where the real swag is, no! Just as an aside, heard on news yesterday that 42 private college presidents now make over $1 million per. Not bad, ‘specially since its ‘all about the children’! With the unbelievable resources lavished on State U, combined with massive welfare obligations in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven (little more than 3rd world colonies on life support) and every other city, and the public sector unions joined at the hip to the democratic party (UCONN, Urban Dystopia, and Public Sector Unions, what a Trifecta, eh?) sucking every last dime out the State, whats left for everybody else, the outsiders, not the insiders tied to State Power?

@backrowhackler — you got that right, sho got that right. note that the hoops boys are #10 in nation, the girls, as always, #1. money’s flowing into this little burg like some dam’s fit to burst.

the stories i could tell re the admin’s various lusts, money chief among. and (wink wink) it’s all true what they say about professors’ wives, not gto mention nursing undergrads. life do be sweet.

the real estate around here tanked as much as 30% a few years back; basically the only employer for miles around is the state. but with the influx of new blood and buildings going up, everyone’s thinking about selling.

me, i’m often on campus with my retrievers. the students seem like little children now, i want to push them on a swing set. the young make me hopeful for the world, although i can’t see how they’re gonna work it… it’s not just the inequality of haves vs have-nots, it’s that things are so wickedly skewed by generation. and i don’t see much compassion sprouting up among the smart, rich & old, not much that amounts to nothing.

would that our betters could all be warren buffet and billy gates, no? you earn your pile, you hand it off to people who fvck more than once a month. i’d like to see that day.

I hear you, Orionoir. It just that, when I read several dozen Retired State Employees have pensions that exceed $225,000 per year, I thought, “How could that be?” Then I was told they are all retired professors at UCONN.

@brh – ever the contrarian, i hazard that some of those old profs might actually be worth it. lately what i do for work — if you don’t count my ad hoc campus security scrambles — has been helping old people do simple stuff on computers. the husband of one client, yikes, he’s got an iq like the national debt. as a boy the us military snuck him out of nazi germany because he was widely considered tops in nuclear science. he did a long stint with the dod at yale, then decided to find obscurity at a cow college in the middle of nowhere.

when you get four standard deviations beyond the mean, eg, people so smart, there’s nobody smart enough to test them, you’re talking about hope diamonds and rembrandts. you can’t put a dollar value on these folks.

btw, the girls are playing #2 duke tonight. look for me with in a husky suit assaulting people in the first row.

word to lord blaby: the hoops girls run about fifty-flifty straight vs lesbian. the lord god made them all.

We could talk all day on the merits or demerits of our leaders; the only meaningful discourse is where we are today as a society. On life’s highway it doesn’t matter where we started or where we are trying to go, it only matters where we are when we get off the exit.

Real discussions need to be about how we get to our desired destination. Musings on how we got where we are may be intellectually pleasing, but since we are running out of gas, don’t you think it’s more important to be acting on this eventuality? Not that I don’t like to talk about other matters, it’s just that space here is limited, and so is time.

The Hon. Richard Holwell (big time judge) appearing on CNBC on the subject of ‘why no Wall St. execs have been prosectuted’ used the non-word intemperent when he meant intemperate. What is the friggin’ world coming to?!

so full of vitriol for men who actually showed up and paid attention in fourth grade.

For the record, I would like to say here and now that I am not full of vitriol, but I am full of vittles. I just ate lunch.

Your observation though has made me realize that the prescient documentary Revenge of the Nerds was actually an expose of our financial predicament. I’m stuck in the middle with you. The jocks have their pitchforks and the nerds have their algorithms. I like calling the game. Somebody has to now that Harry Caray’s no longer with us. I miss Harry. And Ben Wright calling The Masters. So what if he called female golfers lesbians. Aren’t they?

K-Dog, your outing of one of the trolls was quite the thing. Great bit of work.

It was amazing. First there was the troll’s confession as to his “real” identity. You wonder about the purpose of this sudden outbreak of “honesty”. A ploy to mis-direct maybe? And then the disappearance.

Hard to know for sure given that this is the internet but maybe an extra-ordinary bit of carelessness on the troll’s part to get caught like that. Shows to go you that people make mistakes. There’s fifty ways to screw up when you’re trying to get away with something. And if you’re a genius you’ll think of twenty five of them.

But then the troll attacks redoubled in intensity with the troll’s re-appearance under a new name and the creation of the “Carol” troll and others and a deluge of semi-pornographic commentary and reams on eastern mysticism.

With the lawless and out-of-control US Securitate and their foreign allies I wouldn’t put anything out of bounds so I have to say that your own hiatus on this site after the outing made me wonder.

Maybe I’m paranoid but I think in this new age only the paranoid survive. I wonder if I’m paranoid enough. What else is coming down the pipe? There’s a lot you can “justify” in the name of national security.

Some commentary on this site is reminiscent in style and content of past trolls. Maybe they don’t want to get banned again so they’re more discrete and not as volminous as in the past.

In the old days, domestic allies of the Nazis or Communists ie “useful idiots” (Stalin’s term), must have had a comparatively perilous existence. Today there’s a degree of anonymity (even if it’s less than iron-clad) with the smoke and mirrors of the internet. So elite interests can be served via deception, disruption, mis-direction, misinformation and distortion. And by acting as agent provocateur. But to those who don’t live with their heads up their asses the baloney is transparent.

Reviled by both the elite whose interests they serve and the greater populace whose interests they betray where do they find friends?

There’s another site I like reading and sometimes commenting on. The blogger-host tightly moderates discussion. A lot of good commentary there and no nonsense and especially NO TROLLS. Banning is a useful tool. JHK should wield it more often.

I understand the concerns of DoD and the elite. If this had been China, this site would have been out of business long ago, JHK and everyone that comments here would have been rounded up, tried and convicted in kangaroo courts and subject years of misery in the gulag. But the US isn’t China, there’s still this pretence of free speech and due process to maintain at least for now. And so the means to an end are less direct.

You wonder how fast this facade deteriorates. Of course there’s a trade-off between privacy and security. Isn’t there? At least that’s the lie. Wait for the next round of lies, that there’s a necessary trade off between security and freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement. You don’t want terror attacks do you? Of course you don’t. Live with it, it’s the new normal. “New normal” is the sneer used to justify every new idiocy and insult

“K-Dog, your outing of one of the trolls was quite the thing. Great bit of work..” Thank you, I had expected that the camp would pull up stakes and move out in the middle of the night but I was proved wrong their fear of not being found out is strong but not strong enough to keep them away. They have a job to do.

Your observation that they misdirect with “honesty” is right on. They employ psychological tricks and misdirection is part of their never ending shell game. There is nothing careless about it. It is crazymaking and gaslighting, psychological manipulation. That their are fifty ways to screw up when you are trying to get away with something. You are astute and correct. What is not understood by them is my unique perspective. I see things which others not aware of their presence do not see.

My hiatus on this site was due to heavy personal attention. My smartphone took on a life of its own and I experienced horror at seeing snippets of my own personal conversations appearing here. I began seeing shiny black suits wearing china white shirts when I left the doghouse. A dress code of field trolls. This persisted until I started leaving my phone at home. Remember Edward Snowden had not made his disclosures yet and the actions could be inflicted on me with far more impunity than they could be now. There is more I could say about all this but I’ve said enough.

You said: “Maybe I’m paranoid but I think in this new age only the paranoid survive.” I agree but the paranoia can’t consume you or define who you are. It must become an awareness and a resolve to take appropriate action nothing more. Don’t assume you are being listened to every time you use your phone. Just accept that you could be and leave it in the trunk of your car if you want or need a private conversation. The problem is they have the technology to use phones close to you or the phones of the people you meet with equal ease. A ‘list’ can be made of every phone within a hundred feet of yours if yours disappears into the trunk of your car and then that list can be quickly checked. Software can do amazing things. And getting others to go along with your precautions can be extremely difficult.

You said: “Reviled by both the elite whose interests they serve and the greater populace whose interests they betray where do they find friends?” There are enough of them that they can have their own community and their paychecks must help to convince they are doing the right thing. I suspect great camaraderie among them.

You said: “I understand the concerns of DoD and the elite. If this had been China, this site would have been out of business long ago, JHK and everyone that comments here would have been rounded up, tried and convicted in kangaroo courts and subject years of misery in the gulag. But the US isn’t China, there’s still this pretense of free speech and due process to maintain at least for now. And so the means to an end are less direct.”

Yes the pretense of free speech is desirable for them to maintain at least for now. On paper we are still a nation of laws but the song is sung that we must give up freedom for security every day and I fear another 911 would be as much of a godsend to them as Edward Snowden was to me and the false flag radar of the average citizen is not very high.

Thank you, I had expected that the camp would pull up stakes and move out in the middle of the night but I was proved wrong. Their fear of not being found out is strong but not strong enough to keep them away. They have a job to do.

And I do this so often one could get the idea I don’t know the difference. Should be:

That there are fifty ways to screw up.

Not only do I open with a run on sentence I close with one too. It should be not one but three.

On paper we are still a nation of laws but the song is sung that we must give up freedom for security every day. I fear another 911 would be as much of a godsend to them as Edward Snowden was to me. The false flag radar of the average citizen is not very high.

There is no doubt more but I’m going to stop obsessing and do something else for a while.

“In his letter, Snowden used Brazilian examples to explain the extent of the US surveillance he had revealed. “Today, if you carry a cellphone in São Paulo, the NSA can track where you are, and it does – it does so 5bn times a day worldwide.

“When a person in Florianópolis visits a website, the NSA keeps track of when it happened and what they did on that site. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck with his exam, the NSA can save the data for five years or longer. The agency can keep records of who has an affair or visits porn sites, in case it needs to damage the reputations of its targets.”

You don’t have to take just my word for it. And pay attention; they are ready and willing to damage the reputations of ‘targets’. It goes way beyond simply collecting meta-data or simply peeping. Of course in our heart of hearts most already know this. It is a no brainier; but most are too afraid to admit it.

“You said: “Reviled by both the elite whose interests they serve and the greater populace whose interests they betray where do they find friends?” There are enough of them that they can have their own community and their paychecks must help to convince they are doing the right thing. I suspect great camaraderie among them.” – K-dog and volodya

Hmmm, camaraderie? Not sure I would have a back-covering trust in someone engaged in the same game of fraud as I was myself. (Perhaps a few carefully-guarded laughs and beers, yeah.)
I tend to place trust in those who are genuine and have proven it more than once. This parameter can also be applied to those that are in the paper-swapping bid’ness.

As to “the average citizen”? Most of them wouldn’t even entertain the notion that they might OFFICIALLY be the subject of a nefarious con/electronic stake-out; it’s too manipulative to contemplate! (Therein lies the power of official pronouncements of misinterpreted innocence, all in the name of public safety. Looks to be working like a consistent charm these days.)

word to lord blaby: the hoops girls run about fifty-flifty straight vs lesbian. the lord god made them all.

orionoir – Softball’s an even higher percentage lesbian. I’m not so sure all of them are made that way. Some certainly are, but there’s also some who are cajoled into it by pure peer pressure and the compelling social need to conform to group standards. I’ve tried, I really have, but watching females play sports just doesn’t do it for me unless it’s pole dancing. Most males feel the same way unless it’s their little precious out there on the court, or the field, or sliding up and down the pole. There’s a reason for that. I don’t know about you, but I’ve no compulsion to strap on a uterus and gestate a fetus for nine months before squeezing it out of a typically tiny orifice. In the same vain, a real woman shouldn’t feel compelled to put on a jockstrap and step up to the plate to hit a hundred mile an hour fastball.

Feminism is based on hatred of Men and Envy of Masculinity. They want to be Men. And of course the corollary: they love Women and hate Femininity. Thus Lesbianism is the logical conclusion. Of course some love femininity in other women and desire them as men do.

For some, politics is the deciding factor. Sleeping with the enemy is verboten.

For Liberal males to be sanguine about any of this is just more evidence of their decadence.

Seriously? All you can do is recite a vulgarized version of Freud’s interpretation of feminism, presented by his nephew Edward Bernays. Repeating these clichés of the early 20s century…?? Feminism is a human rights movement.

[Most males feel the same way unless it’s their little precious out there on the court]

——
@lord blaby — your pov is understandable as far as it goes, but methinks you haven’t seen much women’s ahtletics, or that you haven’t been lucky enough to understand what’s going on.

my eldest daughter rows for the #2 div iii crew team and she’s the strongest on the #1 boat. whatever team she’s ever been on, she’s always by far the strongest. she can peak generate 600 watts on an erg machine, and i don’t know what that means, but i know this computer has half that.

when i was a high school boy distance runner my times were roughly good enough to win the girl ncaas. since then the females have gotten faster. once, near the top of my career, i tried to run pace next to portugal’s rosa mota, who took bronze in the first female olympic marathon. she destroyed me and didn’t even notice.

pure testosterone sports such as ice hockey and american football, okay, you’re right, i’d rather watch pole dancing. although just last month the us female ice hockey squad beat my high school alma mater in an exhibition, and that’s a shock, because hockey is one of the few things preps are good at. (because they recruit from moosejaw, sask.)

getting back to the sex, i once had a male acquaintance who had taken a year off to be a camp follower on the women’s pro bowling tour. he said women bowlers are absolutely voracious because their game is so flocking dull. using this same logic i’ve been hanging out around the local irs processing facility, but so far i’ve had no takers.

Nor is going to Target. I patronized the local Target not too long ago and it’s really turned into a zoo. Not to mention, the majority of the employees are now Black and so too are the majority of patrons. It’s at times like that I feel they lie about the census demographic figures just as they lie about the boring numbers on financial statements. I don’t think I’ll be frequenting the local Target any longer. Being seen there could ruin my reputation, if I had one.

Also, we’ve been indoctrinated with the idea that someone or something’s always watching us. It starts early on with Santa Claus. You know how the song goes: “he sees you when you’re wanking, he knows when you sneak cake, he sees you when you’re throwing dice so you better give him some of what you make.” And then, as we reach adulthood, we’re informed Santa Claus is really the NSA and your present for complying is another year you avoid having your genitals electrocuted and mutilated and a stocking stuffed full of credit cards.

My problem with Women’s NCAA Basketball is that there are only 5 or 6 good teams in the whole country, UCONN being about the best. So what you have are games with lopsided scores where UCONN wins by 60, 75 or even 100 points every night. What kind of sport is that? Why even bother playing the games?

Sounds like you know a very much lot about it. What’s up with that? These ladies can’t run, can’t jump, can’t fight, can’t fuck. They’re pug ugly lumbering behemouths. Yet you watch them. You also voted for Kdog.

and, to everyone else, ignorance re women’s sports is not something of which to be proud: you are simjply proclaiming how little you know re human performance.

excuse me now while i whip this out… a shameless plug for my blog, which, among many many other things, has some good photos of female athletes, especially rowers. scroll down hard, they’re there somewhere.

as far as finding prose re my serial girl-craziness for runners and rowers, well, it’s in there, but damned if i can find it.

when i’m grandiose like this i ask myself, are you mentally ill, or are you simply one grand kind of guy? newt gingrich asks the same question, i know, i once bunked with him at menningers.

be that as it may, i had my first all-time bar-none you-can-never-go-home again crush on a college girl when i wasn’t quite matriculating. many years later i read the news today, oh boy, she took gold at the olympics, heavyweight single, beating the thoroughly medicated eastern bloc behemoths. frickin best rower on earth she was.

i visited her at princeton, packing birth control devices per my kindly english teacher’s advice, it was that weekend that i learned that some girls prefer other girls and that she and i, we’d just be friends. still, one summer, i knew a girl who could do a 6:30 mile on mountain trails, 20 pull-ups, stopping just because it’s a round number, and split rocks with a 16lb sledgehammer the way you might slice butter.

so, you, mr pathetic hetero, don’t tell me what women should and shouldn’t be: you’re a virgin until you go thirteen rounds with the heavyweight champiion of the world.

“Hydro is clearly the technology of choice but let’s face it: not every location on earth enjoys abundant waterways and exploitable elevation differentials.” — Florida Power

Interesting comment, Florida Power.

Fortunately, a solution is possible that does not involve very expensive facilities or batteries, or flywheels or pressure vessels, etc. We do not have to continue punking ourselves with dirty fossil fuels either, as our current dependence on oil and coal is not clean, is not renewable, and is not sustainable.

Fortunately, we already have the technology for implementing solutions that are completely green (a green strategy is one that is clean, renewable, and sustainable). One such alternative energy solution consists of combining pump storage hydro (PSH) with renewable energy soursces (RES). PSH is a mature technology with large volume, long storage period, high efficiency and reliability, while capital cost per unit of energy is low. The typical rating of PHS is about 100– 3000 MW but can be smaller as well as greater. It’s not rocket science. It is proven, simple technology that is clean, renewable, and sustainable.

Combining the operation of RES with PSH solves the problem of the intermittency of RES in a power system (i.e., the problem that the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow). By combining RES with PSH energy is used to create artificial water inflow into the upper storage of PSH. During the intermittent operation of RES energy is used in the power system, but also for moving water from lower into upper storage. Water from upper storage is at the same time used for production of hydroenergy. By enabling parallel water inflow into upper storage, parallel use of two RES is possible, solving the problem of RES being periodical (stochastic and unreliable). PSH is continuous (controllable and reliable). Energy periodically produced from RES, is thereby transformed into hydroenergy that is continuously produced according to consumers’ and power system needs.

Voila! The hydro power you want, Florida Power, without the need for waterways and topographical elevation differential. There is an elevation differential but it is artificial, not natural.

It is a hydro solution, but is one that can be used in areas lacking water (which is unusual, considering that classical perception always connects hydroelectric power plants with areas abundant in water flows, or with periodical water flows, or near the sea).

The operation of a RES/PSH power plant is based on two main natural forces, sun radiation and gravitation, using water as medium for energy transfer. The accent is on solar energy which is available permanently and more or less every day at almost all locations.

orionoir, 44% of female runners experience Amenorrhea which means they stop menstruating. Ignorant women believe this is a good thing but it’s a serious health condition that can have very negative consequences. One such consequence is that they may imperil their ability to carry our children. Maybe the races that are procreating like rabbits have the slack to offer and can afford for some of their women to impede their capacity to have children because of running, but the White race is dwindling and cannot afford such a luxury. It’s up to adult White males and females to police this behavior and guide young White girls into more feminine and domestic roles such as child rearing so Whites can turn this dwindling numbers trend around.

secondly, what do you know about menstruation? is it like a box of chocplates, in which White periods are good and Black ones are even worse than jellies?

a man gets his body fat under whatever, five or ten percent, he has trouble staying warm and bullies kick sand in his face at the beach. i been there, i know. still, that doesn’t threaten the White race. a woman gets likewise skinny, she’s not going to be popping fresh muffins in her oven during track season, big deal, she can cook up a passel in the off-season.

lower fertility for american whites helps us educate our children, share the summer place and not dilute inherited wealth straight to hell. high fertility nonwhites, see also mtv’s sixteen and pregnant, they don’t need no stinking oppressors when they’re over-run by toddlers.

Don’t forget The Ladies will soon be entering US Marine and Army Combat infantry and artillery units. I read last week in Navy Times that the entire Submarine fleet has to be retrofitted with wider passageways so men and women won’t brush against each other when they pass. I served about 1 year in a sub and it was tight quarters believe me.

We will probably see in the future how Obamas New Model American Army, with women and open homosexuality, measures up against Chinese Elite Marines and Russian Spetznatz, who have not experimented in this way.

Surely you don’t think the Blacks organized themselves? Do you think they founded the NAACP? You’d be wrong. It was the Jews. It’s a long road to become a White Nationalist. Until you see the Jewish role, you still have a long way to go.

We or more correctly I should read the long emergency so that I would know to where the long emergency arrives as to our destination.Do things stabilize into some sort of utopia PI ie .post industrial or do we live in some sort of dysfunctional hell, seems to me we are entering hell already sort of pre hell jitters. Even as we sit there with gas in the tank and the lights are on and the fridge is full of food there is ever more anxiety out there. We can see the disintegration all around us ,I won’t disrespect your intelligence by giving examples,of the obvious.
Can we built utopia considering the damage the present system has wracked on our mental , body,being, and the damage that we have enabled on our life sustaining Eco system by being complacent to this madness. We have known for a long time that we were the problem , but someone always comes along and says they are special and so starts the next episode of madness ,into which we are suckered. One would think that collapse would happen quickly ,especially in our integrated high energy consuming operation. We should think in terms of operation ,that is functionally ,and we would soon realize that to run an industrial operation you need the proper operating system,and the present which is defined in political economic terms is about as far away as you could get . You are trying to use an operating system that was devised a few thousand years ago, to run this high energy techno industrial complex system. Here we have a clash of reality, which is pushing us further down the road of hell. We could use all sorts of politically correct terms to describe collapse ,such as quantitative easing,so maybe hell on earth is a good term. We the people must awaken ,we must win the battle ,which is primarily one of consciousness,and that can be a fearful . To see things in a new light, truth with a capitalTis shining through the corruption and dysfunction . I have faith that to live in balance ,as one with our creator is our destination. Please don’t think of creation in terms of big daddy in the sky, as you were brainwashed from birth. Existence comes from creation and living systems require balance for their existence . One cannot take the path of fear into balance ,one must take the path of love,self love within expressed outwardly places us in the garden of sustainable balance. We are getting real close to the fork on the path.
Though I have faith in a supreme principle I don’t necessarily translate that faith into hope.

Thanks for the words of encouragement, Rubeicon. You are one of the few realists on this site. Paranoid fantasies, racism, anti-women and anti-immigration commentary seems to rule here. Your posts are a refreshing exception.

My last post proposed a terrestrial solar energy production of hydroenergy via RES/PSH power plants. There is also another form of solar harvesting which is not terrestrial and seems promising: SPS-ALPHA, which is a new approach to the concept of space solar power.

SPS-ALPHA (Solar Power Satellite by means of Arbitrarily Large Phased Array) delivers energy to Earth via a geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), where it would intercept sunlight using a collection of individually pointed thin-film mirrors, convert that sunlight across a large radio frequency (RF) aperture into a coherent microwave beam and transmit the power to markets on Earth or in space.

The SPS-ALPHA concept could make possible the economically viable delivery of solar energy to markets on Earth. In particular, economic analysis shows that a full-scale SPS-ALPHA should be capable of delivering power at a levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of approximately 9¢/kilowatt-hour. In North America, peak power costs have been estimated to be as high as $1.00 – $1.30 per kWh.

Also, the calculations the fossil fuel guys use to show how “cheap” gas and coal are for electricity production do not take into account external costs that SPS-ALPHA avoids.

For example, the US Energy Information Administration predicts that continued use of coal and gas to deliver the majority of the world’s electricity is expected to result in the evacuation of millions of homes in low lying areas, and an annual cost of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of property damage.

Already massive international climate litigation lawsuits against fossil fuel users are beginning to appear in the International Court of Justice. We can expect more such litigation as entire nations go underwater. Those environmental and legal costs are the kinds of external costs ignored by promoters of gas and coal when they say their energy is “cheap.”

Oh, oh, I’m feeling uncomfortable that ghosts are trying to take back this blog yet again. I agree with you that the entity Asoka is back. After all, he is multitudes. I don’t know yet if he is a single apparition or if the 2nd or 3rd shift is manned by others. I’m getting vibes some other past voices have returned as well.

Even so, what Asoka posted about SPS large phased array is good info that is taking us in the right direction. Why do you think he posts info like this if he is just a government troll, and the Feds are obviously bought and paid for by the oil industry, hardly fans of solar power? Could it be big oil knows the future and is invested in solar?

I’ve resigned myself that racism and anti-semitism, no matter how much I don’t want to read those kinds of posts, is not going to go away. Irony of ironies is that the owner of this blog is Jewish. The inherent stupidity of such prejudice, I hope, only informs most other readers how twisted such people are.

More than worrying about the Blacks and Jews, I’d be very concerned about how we’ve lost much of our freedoms here in America, and how the government has robbed the middle class of its wealth, and soon, it’s dignity. The above-mentioned groups don’t have a patent on greed and mendacity. Those grasping for undue power should be removed from positions of influence, whether they’re Jewish or Christian, black or white.

Yes, how many Jews on the Supreme Court now? Is it three or four? At 3% of the population? Billy c’mon – it’s not right. Harvard too – it’s become a shul. Whites are the least represented per capita and Jews the most. It’s not personal Bill, but right is right and this aint it.

Most of the time, you are a reasonable decent man. But when it comes to your people you lose it. Nearly all Jews do. They brook no resistance to their climb to ethnic supremacy. And then you all actually are amazed when you hear the approaching hoof beats of the Cossacks?

Janos — you imply that the achievements of Jews in America are all attributable to some sort of cheating. I’d submit that the cheating on Wall Street is trans-cultural. As for success by Jews in medicine, jurisprudence, and other professions, that is more likely the product of a long tradition of respect for learning – something absent, for example, in the contemporary culture of other ethnic groups in America. — JHK

@jhk — i chanced to do some grad work at fancypants brown univ, and it was a singular thrill, but even in that citadel of wasp privilege i was struck by the oncoming korean wave of achievers.

my best buddy was there with a brothership of koreans — they did exeter together, then brown undergrad, then brown for various grad. they moved through life as if a single entity, co-mingling family, friends and everything else.

john explained to me, we are the new jews. and so it seems: the family sacrifices, the children work like demons, the group advances with a clear sense of purpose.

their preeminence in medicine, academia and music suggests that they’re not all about money. we wasps can rest easy.

But what role will the educated play in the ‘Long Emergency’? A certain number from all dog breeds rise above their culture; have a born innate curiosity, and educate themselves. I posit that this remnant will survive. But in the greater scheme of things this remnant may be irrelevant.

How will an ethnic tradition of learning fare in a world of ever shrinking opportunities? May there be danger that those committed to learning will be seen as responsible for civilizations decline?

They did after all play a role in the un-measured climb up to civilizations peak. Something to wonder about. But the coming chaos may prevent rational speculation such as mine here to become irrelevant. When the structure which supports reasonable cause and effect relationship in human affairs collapses how will the educated fare? If life becomes a random walk in a jungle of despair and the law of the jungle reigns like steam bubbling in a roiling pot what advantage will an educated dog have?

Perhaps the better question is how does a long tradition and respect for learning in any breed fare in a culture of chaos?

I speculate there may be some advantage. Perhaps any tradition that encourages group cohesion will be of some benefit. But how much?

Cheating? By no means – hard work, ability, and teamwork. Low or no interest loans to each other too – something we should have done. But it’s the results that are devastating. Is it really good for a few Jewish Billionaires to control so much of the Mainstream Media? And Hollywood? Are you proud of what your brethren have wrought? And Publishing: refusing to publish the works of White Racialists for decades, editing classics like The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and leaving out the stuff Gibbon (no friend of Christianity) says about the Jews?

I’m sure you must admit that the Media Conglomerates should be broken up. Should but wont, no more than Banking. Capitalism tends towards greater and greater centralization of power and wealth in a few hands – becoming indistinguishable from Socialism as per the Affordable Care Act. And thus did the two system combine in WW2 against the Nations that wanted to remain free.

You imply there is no favoritism in the admission of Jews and Asians to Harvard – and no discrimination against Whites? It was such a symbol of White Christian Culture – it was simply irresistible not to “transform” it!

Some Jewish guy wrote an article awhile gleefully mocking the hand over of Protestant power to other groups. He’s right: it’s utterly bizarre how Whites have refused to defend themselves. That part of it certainly isn’t the fault of the Jews: they merely exploited it. Anyway, you folks have won and are consolidating your power in concert with the elites of other ethnes, including some of the White Protestants of course. The Jews are the Leaders of the Grievance Coalition AND the Power behind the rickety Republican Throne. So now what? To conquer America, it had to be ruined. So as Ted Kennedy said shortly before he died, enjoy the moment because that’s all it will be.

orionoir – I was considering this year for the first time in my life running a marathon. For the past decade I’ve been long-distance running to stay in shape and gradually I’ve been increasing the distance I run. I now think I can do a marathon, but I was not pleased with my research into the process. It’s almost not worth it. I’ll just run my own personal marathon and give myself a homemade certificate of completion in order to avoid the throngs of freaks who feel compelled to run in public marathons and yet have no business doing so.

My research started with the New York Marathon. The first race for this event was in 1970 where 55 out of 127 competitors finished. The course essentially consisted of running around Central Park multiple times while dodging rapists, bums and drug addicts. The NYM was started by a Jewish guy named Fischel Lebowitz. Go figure. The event is yet another example of Build It And They Will Come. And man are they still coming. And coming. And coming. Ironically, because running is allegedly supposed to be an activity that promotes health, the Romanian-born Lebowitz (who called himself Fred Lebow by the way) died of brain cancer at the age of 62. So much for those health benefits.

After absorbing the history of the event, I looked into the hoops you have to jump through to now run in the event. My conclusion. Fuggedaboudit. Do you know how many participants ran the 2013 NYM this past November? Over 50,000! Crazy. No way do I want to comingle with this carnival of freaks. It’s become a ridiculous, corporate-sponsored spectacle where anyone with connections can run in this event even though many have no business running let alone ever putting on a pair of running shorts. Oh, and of course, it’s become a Special Olympics event of sorts, because you must include an unnatural representation of the handicapped. The dreaded wheel chair brigade. I’m sorry, but if you don’t have legs or your legs don’t work, you can’t run, and if you can’t run that means you don’t get to enter an event that’s about running. This, in a microcosm, is a prime example of what’s wrong with the U.S., and what’s happened to the U.S. Let me explain. I don’t have ovaries, a uterus and a vagina, therefore I can’t menstruate. You don’t see me crying and complaining about it though, do you? I just have to accept that I don’t have the appropriate apparatus to bleed once a month until menopause (unless I run long distances) and move along so as not to impede the bleeding of others who do have that apparatus. It’s not that difficult to accept this very elemental limitation. But we live in a society where these goofs are told “you can do anything you want to do even if you don’t have the capacity to do it,” and so we have people in wheel chairs riding in running marathons and we have men breastfeeding and before too long lesbians who can purchase home-fertilization kits to include viable, strap-on semen-filled dildos that can release their payload at the optimum moment of intercourse. And all that gets applauded as being enlightened and progressive. WTF?

@oh lord blaby — you’ve lost your mind in a novel way, and for that i will always be grateful. i thought i had seen it all.

if you hate people, avoid major city marathons: it’s the hugest humanity overdose i’ve ever experience. if you’re near the back of the pack, you will discover that the course is literally slick with other people’s spit.

i did a couple new yorks, one boston, and a few more rural events; the city races are spectacles, and, as such, they’re surely not about the metaphysics of endurance, the loneliness of distance. still, it’s a heckuva way to meet women.

my best was 2:38 on slow course (east lyme, ct) — it’s a respectable performance, but it ain’t worth sh!t, eg, it might get me an entry fee waived, nothing else. such is the life of a wannabe, a couldvbeen. still, i used to hang out with a couple 28 minute 10k guys, good enough to get paid to race anywhere, but not good enough to have a life, eg, training 24/7, bopping around airports, homeless, unloved, gradually burning out. worldclass, you have to be well under 28 or you’re nobody.

when we were kids it was all about going fast. my wife plans to inscribe it on my stone: he loved to run. now i’m post-cancer, got a bag ‘o shit strapped to my tummy (ostomy) and arthritis that shows up on a skeletal x-ray like obesity in america. this past labor day i entered the new haven 20k because everyone kept telling me not to, and i died repetitively, the whole thing was like a sadly aborted joke.

who cares? i live vicariously through my kids. i study their faces in photos, zooming til the pixels get feisty. there’s a look, one part relaxation, one part murder, an inward calm, a sense of mastery in the midst of panicked hysteria: my two reach that state. i like to believe i once did.

@backrowheckler — it’s been nearly ?nine years i’ve been out of the woods vis a vi colon cancer iv, it’s mostly just a memory now.

as you may know, stage iv anything tends to kill a boy in a hurry, but i lucked out at ten-thousand to one according to my oncologist, so i guess that explains why i’m so obnoxious sometimes: i’ve got an immortality complex. just a few days ago i revisited that idea in my blog — http://orionoir.blogspot.com/ — to which i’m fixing to return real soon now. commenting here makes me unhappy with myself, so i try to do it sparingly.

after it looked like i was surviving, i made myself available to others with the same illness. everybody died in a hurry. so i quit that.

my son’s in thick of college admissions right now, and it takes me back to when my daughter was in it, how we shamelessly milked the “dad’s dying of cancer” theme in the interviews. perhaps that’s the secret to survival.

cya, perhaps at a huskies game. and you tell me, what’s wrong with running up the score, if we’re the ones doing it?

Read your article last week. Interesting. But allow me to point out a few things. First, the Scots-Irish are probably far more violent than the Puritans. But the Puritans were famous as Soldiers and their discipline made them great soldiers, generally able to defeat the Scots-Irish. Egalitarianism is not pacifism. And the Puritans of New England were the Minutemen, the Citizen Soldier. Now as their Egalitarianism curdled and became Socialism, they have been disarmed and emasculated. The Old Puritans would be appalled at all this. The Scots Irish will do far better despite their lack of organization and higher levels of crime should the shit hit the fan.

According to KMac, the ancestors of the Puritans and the Quakers were from Scandanavia, which according to him has always had a very strong egalitarian ethic far back into pre-history, perhaps because of the severe climate. But at the same time, they are very individuated, always living in one family per house. Interesting if true.

Obviously it was difficult to bring all these groups together to create America. And that’s when there were new resources to be conquered or discovered and when people believed in what they were doing. Now we are supposed to assimilate far more alien peoples when there are no jobs and no new resources? It boggles the mind how anyone could be insane enough to believe in open borders. It is born of hate, greed, and/or ethnomasochism – not reason or any real idealism.

And even today’s emasculated Puritans and Quakers have tremendous hatred for those who reject their moral adventurism. The Hatred for those who break with the Community hasn’t changed. But instead of doing anything about it themselves, they have the State do it for them.

Whenever possible, choose a woman, right Prog? Don’t ever change. We like you just the way you are. We want Women like this to be in charge of the military. They are cleaning it of racists and sexist like Blabby.

Alrighty then, where were we? …Oh yeah, verily, punking ourselves unto death. Another round of pronouncements designed to punk is going out far and wide to the anxious eye-rolling herds (and the Wall Street cowboys riding said herd).

Yes, Bernanke (Fed High Priest) will give a slight head-fake today and give lip-service to easing the easing, but will wind up with a large “however”. “However, at this time it would put markets at risk to reduce QE and have interest rates rise… so we ain’t a-gonna do it.”

Consider that the insiders have it that the Fed now owns about 4 trillion in Gary (and his US Bonds). That’s right, you read that kee-wrecked-ly — Trillion. What could possibly go tits-up in this scenario? Relaaaaaax.

I heard the Women’s Black College teams are looking for older White Male cheerleaders.

I attended Texas A&M for a couple of years and they had White male cheerleaders. They called them yell leaders but that was just a fancy name for cheerleaders. It’s one of the reasons I transferred from Texas A&M and did not graduate from that freakish “institution.” It’s still flowing by the way, but hopefully in time it will evaporate or its tradition of male cheerleaders will at least. Maybe it already has. I haven’t looked back since I hightailed it outta there many moons ago. Sorry, but male cheerleaders are a blasphemy. I can’t and won’t hang with that. Wasn’t George W. Bush a cheerleader? I’m sorry, but if you are a male cheerleader or were a male cheerleader, you’re gay and just haven’t admitted it to yourself.

So…following the logic above…
all those men in the bleachers standing up with no shirts, dancing, paint all over themselves, yelling their hero’s names and chanting reveal them to be closet gays and transvestites.

Whether one gives two shits or a plug nickel about the distractions of the “sports industry”, I enjoyed #5 in a bullet-pointed outline of some percs for the well-to-do. Please give, won’t you? Don’t you want Zuzu’s bells to ring so that bereft angels can be gifted with wings?:

5. The National Football League Pays No Federal Taxes

One of the most profitable organizations in America, with billions in tickets, TV rights, and merchandise sales, and with an NFL Commissioner who earned more money than the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and AT&T, is considered a non-profit. It has a tax-exempt status.

It gets even worse. While the individual teams themselves are not exempt from federal taxes, they enjoy multi-million-dollar subsidies from their states for new and refurbished stadiums. Fans – and non-fans – of the Washington Redskins, the Cincinnati Bengals, the Minnesota Vikings, the Seattle Seahawks, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Pittsburgh Steelers are among those who pay taxes for their hometown football fields. New Orleans taxpayers paid for leather stadium seats. For the Dallas Cowboys, a $6 million property tax bill was waived.

A Harvard University urban planning study determined that 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers, rather than by NFL owners.

Like many others, I’ve tried to play along, pull my weight, contribute to–and take ownership i–things like social security and federal deposit insurance. Today I read that JP Morgan wants to sue you, me, and everyone as owners of the FDIC, because they got burned on a shitty bank deal. These people have some balls on ‘em, I must say. I wonder what it would take to get us off our butts to put a stop to their insulting behavior.

One proven cure of bad behavior is to acknowledge it by not giving it anymore power over you or your time; setting yourself apart from it because you want to do good. People don’t have the power to change others bad behaviors, only how they react to badness by choosing whether or not to work with them. It’s only when the changes of individuals harmonize that bigger changes manifest. Sometimes the problem isn’t in determining what is good or bad, the problem is ambition.

About 3 years ago, amidst much fanfare, gladhanding and self congratulatory backslapping, the Governor and his environmentalist friends announced the two Electric Energy Companies in CT, United Illuminating and Connecticut Light &Power, were abandoning coal and petroleum to produce electricity, and was switching everything over to Natural Gas, because, they sat, it burns cleaner and ‘we are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas’. Having read what JHK says about the future availability of NatGas, I thought this maybe wasn’t such a good idea. But who am to question the Governor and ‘environmental leaders.’

Sure enough, today it was announced that next year Electricity rates will increase as much as 21% because of the higher costs of Natural Gas. I guess Jim’s right: when it come to energy, there is no free lunch.

Legislating morality is done all the time, for example, laws against theft, assault, kidnapping, murder. Standards of conduct have been around a long time whether they were written down or not.

I guess I’m belaboring the obvious. I think that when we talk about “morality” we mean sexual behavior.

I read that Germany liberalized its prostitution laws a while back I suppose to show their hip, progressive bona fides. You know, they didn’t want to be seen to be legislating “morality”. Because an act between consenting adults is not the state’s business especially wrt to sex. Right? These ARE modern times.

I also read that an unemployed female info-tech worker was threatened with a cut-off of unemployment benefits if she refused to go to work at a legalized brothel because that particular place happened to have a job opening. And so, to the German government, a woman selling her ass is just another paycheck. Can you imagine?

He just didn’t feel like going to work (don’t blame him – we shouldn’t have to) so he just said he was in Pakistan working for the CIA. Just a “the Kdog ate my homework type excuse!). A typical Climate Change Expert.

We should get to work at home if we like and also get free Tobor money or Social Credit. Our Ancestors labored so we could live like Gods. They left their farms and moved their families as the Company dictated. IBM meant I’ve Been Moved. Then the Companies became Corporations and now they don’t need us anymore – after we gave everything. We’ve been swindled out of our birthright like Esau. Sure we were dumb but that doesn’t make it right. That’s no defense.

I bet there are those who’d like to give me 32 months for “riding his bicycle, reading books and working around his house” too. Maybe more like 32 years. But I’m not getting a government pay-check, and not lying. So my situation is different.

And volodya, what you read goes way back to 2005 and looks not to be true.

If women were being forced into prostitution by the German government Angela would be way off to compare the NSA to the Stasi. No way could that be right. But since it isn’t so her complaint can be taken seriously.

Morality demands conformity of character. (See “being a Jew” on the internet.)

Legislation does not demand conformity. Laws are a base line to determine degrees of damages that will take place by various people of the land no matter what status those people hold. Man-made law has never been able to make people do what is right, it just notifies them they have failed. Everyone has broken a moral law in their life but not everyone is punished for it. Legislation requires that everyone be held to account by the same set of laws and punishments.

Once it’s been proven a person has broken a law (which can be quite difficult), the courts, not a religion, has to determine what is a reasonable punishment. Secular punishments have been mocked by the victims as “a slap on the wrist”; very unsatisfactory. So how can the laws enforce something that is held in various levels of esteem or not held to be of value at all? That is why ignorance of a law is not an excuse to break the law without punishment.

All these economic shenanigans are practised to keep the flow lines of money circulating through the system . When the flow stops the system stops. In reality one should not call our political /economy a system. A system has an understandable rational objective . Our “system” if it has any meaning at all is to keep the greatest flow to the richest and adequate flow to the masses so they don’t rebel, and are kept as loyal zombies. It’s getting ever more difficult to keep this scheme going. The zombie middle class got comfortable in the good times when the economy was growing with good paying jobs and great Xmas parties. The flow lines are getting clogged too many workers too few jobs, too many things not enough buyers,either they have it or not enough money to purchase. There is not enough flow in the system so the money machine aka Fed creates more flow out of nothing and they call it debt. All money is debt ,created out of nothing ,oh yes they will pay on demand the same debt. The money in your wallet can soon change into that nothingness from whence it came. You can check out my previous post on the 17 to get an overview of how we must begin to see things from a different perspective.

orionoir – I’m starting to feel the very beginnings of what you’re experiencing physically. My body is not quite as resilient as it used to be. We spent Thanksgiving in the mountains hiking. I used an older, expensive pair of hiking boots that haven’t seen nearly enough activity over the years, so they were in good shape even though they’re seven years old. However, I feel like Frankenstein when I put them on, or Herman Monster. They’re bulky and cumbersome, but they provide good traction and they keep my feet dry and warm. They never gave me any problem before this year but they were never comfortable and I was always happy to get them the hell off my feet after a long hike. This year they strained the ligaments in my knees and not until today have I been able to bend my knees, especially my left knee, to accommodate a complete crouching position. I just received some Taurine to help with the nagging arrhythmia that seems to exacerbate when running long distances and apparently it helps with muscle and ligament bounce-back as well. We’ll see. I, like you, have always been known as a runner, especially when I was young. I ran all the time but then for some reason I didn’t for about thirty years until I picked it up again about a decade ago, and now I get miserable when I don’t run. I can’t tell if I’m destroying my body or helping it with the running. I run on trails now to spare the unforgiving pounding of the pavement and I’ve also taken up mountain biking and have had quite a few nasty spills. When I spill I’ll lay there for a couple minutes to make sure I haven’t broken anything. So far I’ve broken a toe and a couple of ribs and scraped the hell out of myself all over on several occasions. My wife just nods her head and laughs. She’s a belly dancer, by the way. Something I wholeheartedly support for all the obvious reasons. My goal if a I ran a marathon would be to finish in 4:00 or under. I know I could do that. As you know, running is a psychological endeavor. Fifteen years ago my mind would never have allowed me to believe I could run the distances I do now. You have to break on through to the other side and once you do, distance isn’t as big a deal as it’s made out to be. That 2:38 time is fantastic. It’s obviously out of my league. I want to run one so it will serve as an example to my fifteen year old daughter and eleven year old son. I want them to see what can be accomplished when you put your mind to it. So, we’ll see. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Perhaps I’ll run the Disney Marathon instead of the New York or Boston.

@blaby – i say go for it. a first marathon is a strange rite of passage, nothing like you can imagine, even if you’ve raced at other distances or trained beyond twenty. my mother was an age group colossus (often winning her category while finishing dead last overall) and she compared marathoning to childbirth, except, at the end, le bebe c’est moi.

four hours is surely doable — i had figured my 20k debacle was going to be my “proof of concept” for 4:10 this spring in boston, my secret dare to copycat terrorists. (next year’s boston is going to be an absolute zoo: you heard it here first.)

alas, sometimes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. for you i recommend aspirin and sucrets, plus scotch whiskey on the weekends.

tolstoy wrote that the desire of all men is to be christ, but for me it’s to be a decent father to my kids; perhaps there’s not a difference. as a man i’ve failed in important ways, but i’ve seen my kids thrive, and at times i see better aspects of myself in them. genetically i’ve endowed them with efficient hearts and heads for scrabble, but as an example i’ve so often demonstrated how not to live.

my 20 and 18 year-olds affirm the ethos my coach taught me, and so often i wonder how this came to be, how did they learn to perform so courageously? still, disease and distance running teach one thing: there are things more important than suffering. we glimpse worlds upon worlds as we learn step by step to transcend this corporeal life.

The U.S. is starting to look like a “absurdist’s paradise”. For example, one can now buy 2 homes in some collapsed cities in the U.S. for the price of a one day stay in a typical hospital room in a US hospital. The U.S. is fighting 6 – 8 wars that no one ever talks about. Drones…. The stock market pumped up by money printing. Lobbyists write all of the legislation that US Congressmen pass often without even reading. People making 6 figure salaries to monitor people’s internet conversations and online game behavior. Formerly middle class women taking jobs at massage parlors giving hand jobs who are indignant at being referred to as prostitutes. Men and women on US nuclear submarines six months underwater. US colleges and universities scamming young Americans to assume huge, non-dischargeable debt for unemployable degrees that ruin their lives, etc., etc.

“From the outside, North Korea can seem like an absurdist’s paradise, but for the roughly 24 million North Koreans navigating the system, and especially for the elite in Pyongyang closer to the epicenter of the recent reverberations, this is their reality. ”

Dumbest comment of the week. Simply wrong: most Jews in the both Israel and the West are atheists or agnostics. Some may go still go to Temple on the High Holy Days for cultural reasons.

But like Whites, such Liberal Non-Believers don’t have many kids. The future belongs to the Orthodox Jews. So Arn, you will become Right in the FUTURE. You going to have to be satisfied with that. And that’s better than you usually do.

Not convinced? When a Jew asks for Israeli Citizenship, they don’t ask if he believes or practices, they merely seek to confirm his ethnicity.

Persians are Caucasian; but the point is this; Jews come from many races/ethnicities and to call Jews a race, harkens back to the days of Nazi Germany. Because that is precisely the terminology of the Nazis.
The ignorance here is just astounding!

You are right but your accusations are wrong. Jews may not be a race but they like to think of themselves that way. And they act that way. Anyone who has a Jewish Mother is a Jew. You really do ignore a tremendous amount of reality.

Jews BECAME many races due to the diaspora which forced them to find mates outside the original 12 tribes of Israel.
Jews are descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the genealogy carefully recorded and stored in one place, the temple in Jerusalem.
The Mosaic law allowed a place for alien residents but they were not allowed privileges conferred only to the direct descendents of Abraham per the promise made to him by God. That promise has been fulfilled by the birth of Jesus the Christ; therefore, many Jews have no longer seen the need to practice SPECIFIC PHYSICAL RITUALs having to do with temple worship (there is no longer a central temple), sabbath, blood sacrifices and purification rituals. Baptism, the complete immersion under water, is the one physical act that replaces all the other acts of atonement and conversion besides being educated in Holy Scripture. There was never only one body of water designated for baptism, only one God who requires it be done before he extends privileges and rewards.

Christians are really Jews by adoption (circumcision of their hearts) because they follow Jesus who is Jewish on both sides, and worshiped at the synagogue and temple and the rightful King of the Jewish nation (physically and spiritually).

If we follow the argument that Jews control the world then it can be concluded from that, that we are all Jews. Some believe Judaism is more than a religion and it certainly transcends any notion of genetics or heredity so to call it a race is a mischaracterization. To some, it is a guiding philosophy or a state of mind. So, if the assumption purported by both the radical right and left that Jews control the world is to be believed, then by virtue of that the Jews have created a world where their philosophy and/or state of mind dominates and hence we are all Jews because to live in this world the Jews have created we must adhere to that indoctrinated philosophy/state of mind. I know, I know, Ahmadinejad would have a hard time with this, but that’s just his ego getting the best of him. I don’t have a problem with being a Jew since we’re all Jews now. As for the Koreans, don’t get me started.

Just because people don’t agree with the defining of race (black, white, jew) doesn’t change the reality. We have defined ethnicities in the world, some obvious and some not so obvious because people either WANT to be associated with a particular race/ethnicity or they do NOT WANT to be. Like I said, you can’t legislate things like this because people will not agree to conform at that intensely personal/private level.
However, we do need general laws for civil and criminal matters that have touched EVERY PERSON regardless of lineage even though a lot of the enforcement of these laws has been biased and unfair.

Solipsism Blaby. An attempt to avoid the struggle. We lost our civilization, just admit it. And they (and their Illuminati fellow travelers) want to change everything. And yes, that means “electing” a new citizenship.

In the Old West, the cattle were left alone most of the time. Thus the cattle had to be able to hold their own against predators and the elements – and to be capable of long journeys. Such were the Long Horns. But such cattle were dangerous to work with. So they were phased out when no longer needed. We are the Long Horns and we are being phased out. Remember they call us “goyim” or cattle.

Bigots use a form of self-delusion where race and ethnicity are taxonomic categories. They are not. Taxonomy describes the biochemistry package we are born with, while our xenophobia has only to do with how we behave.

Change of subject:

What’s up with the fed’s 10% taper sending the markets up to record territory? Myocardial infarction proceeding flat-line?

Much behavior has genetic roots. It’s natural to love those who are genetically similar more than genetic aliens. Only Whites have minds strong enough to act contrary to this. Like Gandhi treating his son poorly so as not to be accused of favoritism, Whites value moral superiority over survival.

I wonder how the liar AlGore is doing, or what he is doing, with his countless millions he made on the sale of his fake global warming company. His net worth makes Romney look like a pauper, but the liberals won’t say anything about that.

Good article this week by the liberal author — but still would like to hear him tell the truth about the so-called hope and change messiah…..

Couple things strangely related to the topic at hand as we vainly attempt to wipe the sleep from our eyes and a convincing dream/fantasy from our minds.

Firstly, a definition and a warning from Michael Hudson that offers nothing for those who desire a guidebook to a safe future (financial or otherwise). Apologies beforehand.:

“Information economy: A frequent euphemism that the FIRE “service” economy [commonly uses] (a term whose linguistic root is “servile,” meaning slave). Its economic analysis could equally well be called a disinformation economy. The strategy of financial populism is to convince people that the economy’s bottom 90% are best served by pursuing policies that favor the top 10%.

Stated more bluntly, parasitism succeeds by lying. Camouflage is a kind of lying – pretending to be innocuous but actually being dangerous. Taking control of the host’s brain is supplying disinformation. (See Neoliberalism and Neoclassical Economics.) As Marx put it in the “Afterword” to the 2nd German edition of Capital (Vol. I, [1873], London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954:25), in the wake of classical political economy, “Scientific bourgeois economics … was thenceforth no longer a question of whether this or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient … In place of the disinterested inquirers there stepped hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of the apologetic.”

Oh and Communists don’t act the same way? Dude, get a clue: Communism is funded by the Capitalists. No? Then who funded it? The two are One but yes, Capitalism is source and the senior partner. Once the State withers away and everyone is a serf again, the Capitalists will be the New Lords.

You got that right NSA! Yes, Gore is living large. For starters, there’s that leased 747 he flies around the world on, picking up awards and making $500,000 speeches, not to mention the Yachts and Mansions. Global warming is a pretty good gig, pays well and the hours ain’t bad. A few years back he showed up at the local State U to give a speech about just this subject, Global Warming. It was a hot day, but no matter. He arrived in a caravan of Limos and SUVs, and when he emerged from one of them he was surrounded by security agents, who shoved some spectators out of the way. My neighbor, an immigrant from Russia, commented, “Who’s here, Caesar Augustus”?

Look at your pal Ozone’s post above (10:20 am) for a glimpse of the real Ozone behind the blue collar mask. Now he may not be a Party Member anymore, so what does it matter? Well just imagine what he really believes. If a friend of his was suddenly very successful, he might find himself dropped like a stone. Or if by some miracle America recovered, Ozone might become politically active again. Ideas have consequences and his ideas are not only wrong, but toxic.

Secondly, an analysis of where the Great Consumer Economy of America now stands. (Or more appropriately, ‘lies’, which would be, on its’ deathbed.) It includes what is actually goosing the markets; the magic of ZIRP and the legerdemain of stock buybacks.

Again, I must note a caveat. Mr. Whitney is a firm believer in the wacky religion of endless, exponential “growth” on a finite planet, so every utterance is filtered through that holy relic.

“…investors no longer pay attention to the fundamentals. Demand doesn’t matter. Earnings don’t matter. What matters is the Fed and the Fed alone. “Is Bernanke going to keep pumping trillions in liquidity into the financial markets or not?” That’s the policy upon which all investment decisions are made.”

In his essay, he does give a small intimation that we’ve taken a step down onto a contractionary stairway of ever-lowering expectations. (We are simply on another devolutionary plateau of The Long Emergency. Don’t expect solutions, or even facing up to indomitable predicaments from those who profit handsomely from the current setup.)

What is the intended result of a PUNK? To make someone angry and extremely aggitated.

From what I’ve seen of that kind of playing is the realization by the punk’d that things are not being portrayed as they really are. People are lying to them.

Actors are in the business of lying and are rewarded for it.
Businesses have seen the advantages of that kind of behavior and use it in their models.
I recently heard a TED talk regarding lying as being an intrinsic part of every human’s daily life and how the only way you can be successfully lied to is to agree with the lie.

…And thirdly, I’m not too sure why I even bother any more. I should probably just keep my own council and make plans only with those of similar concerns that have nothing to do with theory residing in the fantasy lands of “duh web”.

“I should probably just keep my own council and make plans only with those of similar concerns.”

That’s a good idea. Too much of “duh web” is not a good thing. Too much punking here abouts going on and while one must be able to confront some of the absurdity and punk to personally grow too much of it will tear you down.

folks, once science has the capability to manufacture oil – which this article shows it does – it is only a matter of time before the economy of scale low production costs make this an invention that puts an end to peak oil.

kunstler’s energy descent is toast. as i constantly say, when forced to by shortages or high costs, science comes up with a solution.

we salute you as we whizz along in our bio-fuel powered motor cars into a bounteous future of unimaginable progress.

That’s great news. I’m pumped up. Only a matter of time before the economy of scale lowers production costs? Excellent!

What are the production costs now and how much will economy of scale lower them? How much land is required and where is the land needed to meet the needs of current population? Will production of geek oil biofuel take away from land needed to produce food? Can production costs be lowered enough to make geek oil cheap enough to support the current unregulated growth lifestyle or will we still need fundamental change to living arrangements? Can this ‘second generation’ biofuel be brought on line quickly enough to prevent collapse and if so will we need government intervention to make it happen? The clock is ticking.

Geek oil not peak oil. Like “a gramme is better than a damn”; has a nice ring to it.

Like I said I’m pumped and while you are thinking about whizzing along in your bio-fuel powered motor car and answering my questions I’ll go take a whizz.

Nevertheless, Its hard to take Peak Oil seriously right now. It seems like there is enough oil to keep everything going. I haven’t heard of or experienced any shortages since 1979, have you? We frequently have guests from Europe and they marvel how cheap gasoline is here. TLE was written almost a decade ago; no doubt there will be a problem with fuel supplies in the future, but how far out nobody seems to know, not even JHK. If lines of automobiles begin forming up at your local filling station, fistfights break out, and you hear a few gunshots, then it will be time to worry. Until then, relax.

What are the production costs now and how much will economy of scale lower them? How much land is required and where is the land needed to meet the needs of current population? Will production of geek oil biofuel take away from land needed to produce food? Can production costs be lowered enough to make geek oil cheap enough to support the current unregulated growth lifestyle or will we still need fundamental change to living arrangements? Can this ‘second generation’ biofuel be brought on line quickly enough to prevent collapse and if so will we need government intervention to make it happen?

geez, i dunno.

i hear you can grow algae in vertical tanks though.

and who said anything about unregulated growth lifestyle or collapse?

can’t you imagine sustainability? what really is your problemo?

you gonna get one of them personal computers that cost $5,000 each? i hear they’re changing the world…

we salute you as we careen past you in pollution-neutral self-driving vehicles on our way into a glorious future of abundance.

I actually agree with scepticism generated by the “good side of peak oil” fantasy but it really peak oil is not a subject of opinion and scepticism has no place.

The amount that is in the ground, the costs of getting it out of the ground and the rate as which the billions of people now on the earth use it up are facts. Hard facts which anybody can find out on their own. It is a mathematical equation to be worked out. ‘Theory’ has nothing to do with it. Work it out and find the answer.

Just because people can be idiots does not necessarily make what they believe untrue. Writing an article based on the premise that idiots believe it so it must not be true is idiotic.

And the next page makes the claim that the amount in the ground can’t be know so therefore it is variable. The truth is no matter what people believe about the amount in the ground or want to believe about the amount in the ground the amount in the ground does not change. The facts that matters here are those known by a geologist and not just any one you want to pick. Only real geologists count.

Goldstein was a class act. He published doctored photos of his son having sex with men and his own mother, Goldstein’s third ex-wife, after the son asked him not to attend his graduation from Harvard Law School. He made a “good” living off of being a purposely provocative asshole. He cleverly capitalized on the friction he strategically generated. And now he’s dead from renal failure, and to take a look at him, the last ten years at least of his life had to be a battle with one health issue after another. I’m surprised the creep lasted to 77 without a sniper taking him out. Larry Flynt wasn’t as lucky, but he probably was wealthier.

But he made good money! And he did it for a good cause – to degrade Christianity. He said so in an interview once. Jews will forgive a lot when that’s the case. Now I suppose some fool is going to deny Jews dominate Porn? Or is that wrong just because Hitler said so? Or is owning and operating Screw wrong while screwing the West via International Banking is not only Ok but commendable? Madoff’s real sin was screwing other Jews.

Here’s a photo of Goldstein at his Bar Mitzvah. Such promise. His folks must have been proud. “Where did we go wrong?” I can hear them saying. “He was always such a good boy.” “It’s the society we’re living in, I tell you.”

* am i being hypervigilant, or do you equate illness with moral defect? it’s so common these days, people bragging about their health, as if it’s god’s own stamp of approval. the whole fallacy re terminal illness, cancer especially, that a good attitude (or diet, or lifestyle, etc) will get you through. life doesn’t work that way… i mean, look at the old nazis in uruguay, they’re having a grand ol’ time.

Harvard Law? You think that’s good? A lot of that is who you know you know. Now do you really think Elena Kagan got appointed to the Supreme Court on her own merits? You think she was the most qualified? Her Jewish credentials were impeccable I admit.

Yes, you’re being hypervigilant. I’ve watched my share of alcoholics die early deaths and their lives were mostly miserable by their own hand. It looks like the Grim Reaper said “fuck you” to Al Goldstein as Goldstein was so fond of saying to the rest of the world his entire life. I’m sorry if I offended you. I didn’t know you were a fan of Screw magazine and Al Goldstein. Liberals don’t give a shit about the objectification and degradation of women so they’re always quick to defend pornographers and pimps.

Let’s face it, orionoir, sometimes illness is the result of moral defect. Certainly not always, but certainly sometimes. Alcoholism is but one example and I don’t buy this crap that addiction is a disease. It’s a moral defect. Some moral defects are more hazardous to your health than others and living a “clean” life is not necessarily a guarantee of good health either. I like to investigate how people die. It’s a morbid fascination with me. It always has been for as long as I can remember, so if I noted the cause of Goldstein’s death, maybe it was me channeling my inner coroner yet again.

Still, he was a scumbag and as Janos noted, his purpose was to help destroy Christianity. He tempts good Christian men with his lewd filth and before you know it, these otherwise fine and moral Christian men are ejaculating into tissues or whatever else is handy rather than into the love canals of their wives and that means less children and that means not only the degradation of women and morality but the diminution of the magnitude of moral force by reduction of the ranks.

And one final note. You and I were discussing being an example to our children. What kind of example was Goldstein to this child who rejected him? Instead of swallowing that rejection and introspecting and reflecting upon it, he seeks spiteful vengeance and publicly slanders and humiliates his son and his ex-wife. Is this something you endorse? You feel a need to defend a creep who would do such a thing? He deserves my derision regardless of what little “good” there may have been in this petty opportunistic provocateur.

Orionoir is or enjoys playing the cynical world weary rake. Such cynicism is fashionable – and it is another name for decadence. In extreme cases they think pornographers are better men and better for society than ministers.

On the hyper-vigilant question though, remember that the New Age has made tremendous inroads into our culture. And one of its doctrines is that good people don’t get cancer. He is reacting to this I think and quite rightly. In itself it is an appalling idea.

I think our many toxins play a big role. My nurse practicioner told me that she didn’t see much cancer down in Haiti. Their problem is parasites.

Yes, I think there’s that about the new age bullshit, but there’s also a very basic tendency that we all fall prey to, and that’s taking criticism personally and reacting to a criticism that was not directed at you as though it were directed at you. I’m guilty of it on occasion so none of us are immune to this behavior. It stems from a sense of insecurity I believe. An unreconciled nerve gets touched by a critical statement and the very primal response is to attack what pinched that unreconciled nerve rather than reconciling why that nerve is susceptible to pinching. I surmise like all the rest of us mortals orionoir has done a few regretful things in his life for which, for whatever reason but usually it’s ego, he will not allow himself to seek forgiveness directly and so he seeks it indirectly and vicariously through onerous villains like Al Goldstein. For that, I forgive him but I also, and more importantly, urge him to forgive himself so we can, once again, remorselessly and unmitigatedly flog and mock the likes of Al Goldstein who so righteously deserve our unmerciful condemnation.

The amount that is in the ground, the costs of getting it out of the ground and the rate as which the billions of people now on the earth use it up are facts. Hard facts which anybody can find out on their own. — Kdog

In fact, the “amount that is in the ground” is not a hard fact.

Governments lie, oil companies lie, and nobody knows just how much is in the ground. The costs, and rate of consumption, are more easily established … but even professional petroleum geologists differ in their ESTIMATES of how much is in the ground.

Let’s just assume there IS a ton of the stuff in the ground to last everyone and their grandchildren into the next century…

How are they going to get it out of the Earth’s crust without it costing more than it’s worth?

Same thing for any mineral deposits that exist on the moon or mars…what good does that do us here on Earth if we can’t get at it.

So, the only benefit to reporting the “fact” we have 100 years of oil is to maintain and increase current demands (rushes) for any kind of oil and stifle funding for R&D in alternative sources for energy.

Humankind now knows where nearly all the oil is. The difficulty lies in extracting it at a rate that meets current and prospective demand.
And if cost were no object, all of the oil could indeed be accessed, eventually (even though at a negative energy return in m any cases!) But this is what the whole argument is about: the peaking of conventional oil is the end of the cheap oil.
See the University of Reading paper: Perspectives on the Future of Oil for further discussion of this topic. (4/Dec./2002 Roger, Oildepletion.org)

This was written before 2008 when the finance industry caploded. Money, like oil, must flow to produce ANYTHING.

There’s also been an awaking concerning other natural resources like WATER. What used to flow freely and be self renewing is now being rationed in bottles and permanently contaminated by humankind’s various and unchecked activities.

Yes cost must be considered and those of us who have followed resource depletion issues for any significant length of time know it is the loss of cheap oil and not just the simple loss of oil that will bring the civilization party to an premature end.

Huge numbers of activities depend on cheap oil to make those activities economically viable. The loss of cheap oil will drive prices of certain essential items beyond the reach of the common man. The loss of cheap oil may bring on a Seneca cliff leading to massive pain misery and death as the economy prematurely collapses before the raw spectre of oil depletion can fully manifest itself. People will be texting images of remembered meals, food they would like to eat, instead of food they are eating now. There will be no phone-app to prevent starvation.

Our unregulated economic system structured as it now is produces bubbles and recessions. As the cost of oil increases a long emergency of economic recession and decline will result because their is no political will in Washington to address the situation or acknowledge its existence. Rule by oligarchy and the death of the liberal class has ossified our culture and made it incapable of responding to crisis. Our leaders are fully committed to rapine and concern for social issues has gone the way of the Dodo bird.

We are going to go down and nobody will be whizzing along towards a bounteous future of unimaginable progress. Nobody at all!

It is not lack of intelligence that dooms us. Lack of character and selfishness is what will do us in.

We find ourselves in a precarious position. Most people are looking only at the present and not seeing the bigger near term picture. Many countries are in effect bankrupt and can only keep going with fiat creation,so we sit on a huge debt that can implode with higher interest rates ,collapsing the multi trillion derivative bets.
The climate change deniers point to the fact that climate warming has actually slowed in the last decade ,what they forget to mention is that the heat energy to a large extent is being stored in the ocean depths, and could soon come back with a vengeance,with self reinforcing feed back loops.
We have been riding the rocky plateau of peak of oil production for quite awhile .Is 2014 the year we start our descent or is it 2015?
Probably most are still riding the wave at the top, so best not to look down.

orionoir – My sixth sense rarely fails me. It appears my last comment to Janos in relation to Al Goldstein and Screw is not only not unfounded, but actually close to spot-on. Would you care to explain the following? If this were my daughter… Well, let’s just leave it at that. Details can be messy and incriminating so I’ll leave it to the imagination.

MANCHESTER — A 43-year-old Ashford man was charged with breach of peace Monday by police who accused him of trying to lure a 14-year-old girl into his car last week.

Police responded to two unrelated reports last week of men trying to get teenage girls into their cars.

Michael Sangree, of 286 Mansfield Road, Ashford, was charged with trying to lure the girl into his car on West Center Street May 16 by asking for directions, police said. The girl instead got into the car of a relative who happened to pass by.

Sangree was held on $10,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in Superior Court in Manchester today.

———-
@blaby — well darn good sleuthing, i give you full credit. can’t you dig a little deeper, eg, how was the case disposed?

not that it was a proud moment in my life: my lawyer said that someone else said that the girl said, he was just some drunk guy, that sums the story pretty well.

i’d give my eye tooth to meet the copywriter who came up with that word ‘lure.’ it caught everyone’s attention.

from time to time i’ve wanted to write about that time, but i’ve always thought, no, it’s best left unsaid. perhaps now with you putting it out for the world to see, i’m free now to be as honest as i feel like being, it’s not as if i’ve a reputation to protect.

as for our correspondence here, well, i can’t say i haven’t enjoyed your writing. but i suppose i’m glad now that we’re no longer friends.

Janos, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. A hint. The “Lord” in Lord Blaby of Lawson is not for no reason. There are forces greater than we understand at play, and if you tune your frequency just right, you can vaguely access some of it. But first you have to believe.

I went to the Connecticut casino yesterday. It is around 90 miles from where I live, and usually takes me between 1.5 hrs to 100 minutes to drive there. This time it took me about FOUR hours. As I’m driving, I’m muttering, ” Where the hell are these people coming from?” It struck me that there are way too many drivers on the road, happy motoring in extremis. Most of the way down route 95, ambulances kept on flashing by. I imagine people are too frenetic now, it being primo consumer season.

We stayed in the MGM casino at Foxwoods, a haven for the youthful crowd in Rhode Island and Connecticut. I saw many young women carousing around. Their dresses were incredibly short. I’m from the 1960’s so I wasn’t shocked, nor do I disapprove, for obvious reasons. Still, the dresses did not extend past their underwear, and in one instance, I swore one of the girls wore no panties – or maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part. Almost all the so-called dresses were black. Many of the young people were intoxicated. I’m about the furthest someone could be from a prude, but I couldn’t help thinking our civilization is really going downhill fast.

What with the ridiculous traffic, the ambulances, the exhibitionism by young females, the public drunkenness, the riotous, forced freneticism, and though I am an atheist, I was in Sodom or Gemorah, or perhaps in a futuristic dystopian novel. It seems what our fathers and ourselves have wrought has come home to roost.

William, pretty soon you won’t have to drive so far. I think I just heard a casino is going in at the old Suffolk Downs race track, right in your neighborhood.

The type of traffic on I495 you describe is what makes me doubt the validity of the peak oil theory.

Yes, in the land of steady habits, founded by Puritans who came here from England to escape Charles 1 and the Church of England and found a New Jerusalem based on a literal reading of the New Testament, we’ve come a long way in 380 years. Gambling is our main business now, but not our only business. All kinds of new concerns are opening to produce ‘medical marijuana’. (I’ve learned grass can cure any disease known to man). So we have gambling and drugs … only thing left is for the state to go in for pimping out young girls for a perfect trifecta in vice … which is what it takes to fund the welfare state and pay for state employee unions.

Marijuana is part of the pharmacopeia of a number of highly developed ancient medical systems such as the Chinese and the Vedic. It stimulates appetite and digestion while repressing nausea. Very useful for many cancer patients. Very.

You are correct Janos, and it’s only a gateway drug because the same shits you have to deal with to get it because it’s illegal are the same pushers who peddle the addictive synthetic shit like heroin and cocaine which also not coincidentally happens to be more expensive. Just because someone partakes of cannabis doesn’t mean they’re more likely to partake of heroin, cocaine or any other addictive drug. In fact, quite the opposite. Cannabis is a fill-in drug for hard-core addicts to carry them over between fixes, it’s not a substance you graduate from to lethally addictive substances as the myth would have us believe.

That being said, I don’t condone teenagers chronically using it everyday. There is strong evidence that chronic use of it can have deleterious effects on still developing brains. Yet it’s the teenagers who, once again not coincidentally, have easy access to it even though it’s illegal. Teenagers have broader social networks and the pushers target them so they can push these easy marks to the harder stuff in several years. It’s not because the cannabis makes them crave harder core, it’s because they’re impressionable and vulnerable and their developing brains have been negatively impacted by chronic use of an otherwise positive substance if used responsibly.

Marlin, I didn’t think about that next step. The state controlling prostitution? What a wonderful idea. Forgetting about the immorality of allowing young women to get paid for sex (don’t think there’d be too many 60 year old hookers), ponder the the synergistic effect with gambling – the state would make a fortune. Sin always pays in the short and intermediate term, although the payback can be very high in the long run. Why, all we’d have to do is legalize drugs and voila! you have your perfect trifecta. Look at the benefits: with mandatory government inspections, std’s would be drastically reduced, the prostitutes would be safer, the drug cartels would go out of business or become legitimate, law enforcement could concentrate on solving real crimes, the prison system would be down-sized, etc., etc.

We probably should do on or the other; either go back to a Traditional Society or a more or less completely Libertarian one. This in between seems the worse of both possible worlds. BUT I don’t think most people could handle Libertarianism or they’d put out on the street by Libertarians who are better at it. And with the amount of diversity and agnosticism/atheism, what version of Traditionalism could we possible settle on? I’m afraid the Worst of Both is the Best we can do until the bottom falls out.

Speaking of the Welfare State, we learn there’s a company providing large blue plastic shipping barrels to the Bodegas and Markets in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury etc. Immigrants from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean, that is to say the entire population, are using these barrels to ship food bought with US FoodStamps back to their families in the home country.

Right about this time, around the holidays, do-gooder organizations, mostly white Libs from the suburbs, go into high gear with their pleas for donations of food and money for the starving people in the urban areas, laying it on thick and guilt tripping us to give as much as we can bear. These ubiquitous blue barrels, shipped all over the third world, change the dynamic a little bit, at least for me.

I don’t know why you would bring her up. Far as I know she has been minding her own business staying out of here and running for congress. Wage clearly had a different personality and here it was you just the other day who was saying that it is difficult to impersonate other avitars.

For shame; one would think that she would be left alone for doing her part and staying away from here as requested by ‘David’ in person. I remember her last comment saying it was at a shopping mall when she was approached and explained the situation in her last comment on her way out a year ago.

No honour amongst thieves I guess. And why would she be here as someone else? She never intended to deceive and it would make no more sense for her to pretend to be someone else as it would for me to pretend to be someone else. I regret not believing her original claims when she peeked behind the curtain and saw what she saw. At the time it all seemed too outlandish, silly me.

One issue concerning ‘short memories’ should be considered. The greater public and casual reader may be easily deceived by temporal inconsistencies (hows that for a euphemism) but their use confirms suspicions of regular readers. A case of not being able to have it both ways I’d say. The sort of thing that could be quite a problem if an avitar were transferred to another team member.

That’s the trouble with lies. They must never stop and that is the great weakness.

Janos – That was an excellent article you posted a while back about the Pastoral Pope and the Pastoral Bishops. If you find the time and haven’t already seen it, may I suggest the movie Doubt starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Refreshingly, a Jew didn’t direct it. Instead it was directed by a not so good Catholic boy, John Patrick Shanley, who got booted out of Catholic school in his youth.

It is an excellent story and the movie is riveting. It’s rife with evocative dialogue, something sorely lacking in modern cinema, but what you would like most about it is that it underscores the sentiment of the Pastoral Pope/Bishop article you posted. The priest played by Hoffman is of the pastoral ilk, and the movie is also fitting considering recent events with orionoir. Doubt is a powerful force that enshrouds us daily yet we fail to properly respect it.

I saw it: a fine movie, two top actors. Many Jews have “converted” to Catholicism in order to destroy it. EWTN is full of “Judaizers” – the ancient heresy of those who want to drag the Church back into Judaism. There are real converts too but they seem to be the minority now.

Israel is amazingly 8% Christian, many of them new converts. But they are “Messianic” and don’t think they have to leave Christianity since Jesus was a “Rabbi”. Thus they are in reality just a new sect of Judaism.

Bella Dodd, the Communist Convert, said that the Party planted thousands of men into the Priesthood. The fruits of that mighty effort were Vatican Two. I don’t think Frank is Catholic. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t even a Christian.

I think we’ll see them try the head-fake taper. They must. It will be backstopped by and saturated in statistical lying, and everyone will have trouble parsing the probable effect because the chronic dishonesty loose in this land will have deformed and impaired all metrics of true value. At the heart of whatever remains of this economy is fire, and the officers of the Federal Reserve are playing with it. Pretty soon, we’ll get the un-taper, the final surrender to the crack-up boom that awaits before the western world has to go medieval.

We must hand it to Jim, he was dead on. (Not that many others hadn’t concluded the same.) Bernanke announced a taper to begin in January. He indicated there would likely be announcements of further tapering at each FOMC meeting (each 6 weeks) going forward but didn’t carve that in granite. He allowed that depending on the then data they might halt tapering or even reverse it. (I will bet that they wouldn’t dare halt or reverse the taper for at least 6 FOMC meetings, if ever.) Whatever the case, after an initial drop in the indexes they soared and the DOW wound up with a gain of 292 pts. on Wednesday and more since then.

This was counter intuitive since, as we know, QEs 1, 2 and 3 have been pumping money into the market and causing it to rise to all-time highs so the reduction of this monthly stimulus to the tune of 10B per month and likely further reductions in the future should have caused a decline in the averages. But markets being as perverse as they are they rose instead, with the expressed rationale by the talking heads being that long festering doubt about the taper (if and when) had finally been cleared up and markets love clarity.

This brings me to JHK’s last sentence in the italicized paragraph above:

Pretty soon, we’ll get the un-taper, the final surrender to the crack-up boom that awaits before the western world has to go medieval.

I am completely baffled by this sentence. I ask any knowledgeable poster here to interpret it for me. Lacking such poster, I ask that Jim, himself, please spell it out for me in different words…..if indeed Jim is still monitoring the comments this late in the week.

The taper will trigger the inflation the original QE meddling was supposed to prevent. A case of delayed reaction as QE could never do more than treat the symptom and not the disease. The piper must be paid and Cinderella must be home by midnight. With the onset of Hyperinflation crack up boom the un-taper will be attempted to transfer even more wealth to the rich and get us back into the current phony war. But it will be too late.

Regardless of the connection you see between this movie and the new Pope (not that I question it) the thing that stood out to me was Streep’s perfect capture of what the accent of a white nun in 1964 in the Bronx would sound like. How does she do it?!

There seems to be no end to the revelations of NSA snooping lately. And really, who suspected that they have been capturing virtually every phone conversation and internet/email communication of the entire American populace, if not the world?

But think about this……….with such power the temptation for NSA operatives to acquire and use inside business information for personal gain must be overwhelming. (Believe me, it wouldn’t take much to overwhelm ME.) Examples of how such information might be turned into a fortune are endless and unnecessary to spell out.

He’s a Communist and only believes Catholicism in terms of Social Gospel. He’s a Jesuit – an order that fell to the dark forces generations ago. A famous Jesuit, Father Drinan of Boston College, once referred to Anti-Abortion advocates as the forces of darkness.

Scan your memory banks. The Teaching of the Church is not Communism but rather Distributism – the ownership of land and capital to be as widely distributed as possible. Basically Kdogism without the Kdogs and all their assorted weirdness: hatred of the White Race, Globalism under the U.N, Feminism, worship of Blacks, etc.

But Karl would not have hogged all the dinner rolls. He would have shared the food. I think anybody sitting down with him would have had a comfortable meal and you sure can’t say that about everybody.

Imagine sharing a meal anyone in the Bush family. You would have been safe with broccoli yes, but anything else, a quick jab of the fork, and it would be gone. And they would be smirking while they chew your food. And what about Obama. Having a dinner plate with him would cost the average American six month’s wages. A single pea rolling off your fork onto the floor would be like loosing five hundred bucks. Now how could that be comfortable?

JHK never kicked Wage out. That misdirection was spawned by Progresso4Whatever who claimed she emailed him and wagelaborer’s last post has been cut from the database just like Jang Song-Thaek has been cut from that North Korean Documentary by Kim Jong-Un.

And nefarious forces doctoring a database is far easier to do than airbrushing a documentary.

Uh, sorry, but BRH was here before Wage disappeared. I get along with most everybody, but she and I didn’t. I found her to be a prickly, thin-skinned and humorless woman who took everything very seriously. I once posted a comment with weird humor about hitting a pedestrian and she replied back that a relative was killed by a hit and run driver ( I think she said hit and run), and that I was a terrible person for making a cruel joke. Of course, I didn’t know that, and I could see why she would be sensitive about that subject, so I wrote back apologizing. She didn’t accept the apology, and from that point on castigated me whenever she could. I wrote her off, and I’m glad she’s gone from here.

Of course I know that BRH was here when wagelaborer was here but I believe he was not going by that moniker hence my jab. I believe he preferred the moniker asoka to all others in those days. Something he admitted to recently here himself unless he was pulling my leg. I do have four. If BRH was used in those days it was not used with anything like the frequency it now is.

I don’t labor much, and when I do it’s not for a wage but rather for the intrinsic value one gets from a job well done. Marx was an elitist who attempted to invent a way to perpetuate elitism once Capitalism failed. He wanted his brand of elitism to replace the old order elitism of the Catholic Church. This is reformation/revolution in a nutshell. Under the guise of reformation they seek to install their own particular brand of tyranny. I would never sit down to dinner with a hirsute, unkempt pig like Marx. His repulsive countenance would cause my meal to boomerang. So why may I ask am I thought to be this “Wagelaborer?” Is it constructive for me to ask any of you whether you’re really Obama or Cheney trolling discussion boards for kicks? What purpose would it serve?

Now, back to something more constructive than figuring out who’s behind the mask at the masquerade ball. There’s this issue of doubt and possible intent to abduct. If the act was never consummated, it’s difficult to prove intent, and with the case of orionoir I don’t have all the facts so I won’t pronounce him guilty as charged. He is still innocent until proven guilty, although I now have doubt about that innocence and doubt is shadowy by its very nature.

This hits close to home for me because of something I experienced when I was a young boy. I believe I was around twelve years of age and I was returning home from my friend’s house late one cool, breezy Fall evening close to midnight after watching a horror flick. We were living in a condominium complex at the time and I took a route that meandered through a wooded area and then popped out onto a road that was also part of the complex. My path home took me across this road and then through a couple of courtyards to our unit at the very far end of the complex. As I exited the wooded area to cross this road, a car, a coupe that I believe was an early seventies Pontiac Lemans, traveling very slowly pulls up to me before I have a chance to cross. The driver, a male in his early twenties, leans across the passenger seat and says “where are you going this late at night?” I said, “home.” He said, “well hop in and I’ll give you a ride home. It’s too cold for you to be walking.” My heart is racing right about this moment and I’m contemplating making a run for it but I know he could beat me if he was so inclined so I’m weighing my options. No way am I getting in the car with him, so I decide, for now, I’m going to try to manage him and if it escalates, I’ll make that run for it because I will not give up easily. I can sense he is reading me like a book. He’s scoping me out like a tiger scopes out its prey trying to figure the right angle before pouncing. I respond while all this is rushing through my head and veins, “no thanks, I’m fine, it’s not too cold.” He says, “nonsense, it’s freezing out here. Where do you live?” I say, and I have to really think quick on my feet because if I hesitate he’ll know I’m lying and he may know I’m lying anyway but I have to play this card right now because I only have one ace and I’m only going to lay it down as a last resort, “I live right there” as I point to a unit in a building across the street and down a ways. He looks to where I’m pointing and pauses. He’s reading me and I’m reading him. He’s considering his strategy and so he gives it one final shot, “alright, then hop in and I’ll ride you over there. Come on now, get in.” His voice has changed intonation and it now is no longer an offer or a suggestion, but rather it’s an impatient and peeved order. This is the moment. My heart is pounding out of my chest. It’s telling me to run. My intellect is telling me to give negotiation one more chance, so I concede to my intellect and I tell him, “no thank you, it’s just across the street, I’m fine.” He pauses yet again, recalibrating. You can see his circuitry processing the possibilities like the lights flashing on Deep Blue. Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, he says “are you sure?” I respond, “yeah, I’m sure. Thanks anyway.” He drives away very slowly and I’m here now to tell about it.

You intimated that you were a real Lord! A Lord must be a Lord of someplace. This is the strength of Aristocracy, that it is grounded in the Land. It’s weakness is its exclusivity. The resolution of this binary? Every man a King as Huey Long said. Every man beneath his own fig tree as the Bible says. A capitalism bound by Tradition and limited by real money based on real things or commodities.

The Marxist resolution of this binary or dialectic is to do away with all Aristocracy or Ownership, be is it howsoever small. Thus their resolution is a downward triangle that negates the positive elements of Aristocracy both in terms of ownership and nobility of character. The downward triangle is also the triangle of Black Magic and Homosexuality. My resolution upwards, preserving the virtues of Aristocracy and extending them to all capable of it: the upright Triangle of White Magic. I would say that of the Eye or Horus or the All Seeing Eye, but those symbols have been cooped by the Enemy and turned into the Eye of Sauron.

Peter Jackson sold out by the way. The new Hobbit shows Blacks living in Lake Town.

Created a life peer in 1992, Nigel Lawson now sits in the House of Lords. He is a total conservative and is all about being as sceptical as he can be about climate change. He believes that man-made global warming is exaggerated and is a total privatisation advocate. Lawson is a brain dead conservative with a brain. One of the crusty upper crust.

Lord Blaby of Lawson is here to represent similar views and it would be a good guess to say his first name is Nigel.

No I never implied I had access to dossiers. You are trying to dissemble and imply that I implied I had access to dossiers and I now imply that you are implying that I implied I had access to dossiers because you do.

By the way, I’m neither a liberal nor a conservative, but I have found, in my own experience, that liberals tend to lack a sense of humor. Conservatives, on the other hand, do have a sense of humor, but it tends to the sarcastic.

I, myself, have a slapsticky type of humor that tends to the absurd. How can one not appreciate the total absurdity of life? Movies I’ve always loved that describe my attitude are the anarchistic Marx Brothers flicks, Airplane, Animal House, Sleeper, the Police Squad films, There’s Something About Mary, and most of the Cohn brothers’ work.

Yeah, Janos, they’re mostly Jewish, but politics aside, you have to admit that Jews have a keen sense of humor, generally.

Bill, you failed to mention the Three Stooges, the greatest of them all.

A friend of mine is related to the Howards, and as a kid spent several summers at Moe’s house in Los Angeles. He said Uncle Moe drove around town in a Dodge Dart, liked to cook out, and never turned away a fan seeking an autograph. In short, A Good Guy.

Their humor is timeless. The youngsters running around here still like watching The Three Stooges on TV.

Oops, that’s right. Can’t remember them all, I guess. BTW, every New Year’s Eve, channel 38 in Boston has a Stooges marathon. I always watch much of it. Can you get in where you are? They don’t make ‘em like they used to, that’s for sure. Oh, yeah, I also love Robin Williams.

Sure they’re funny, but often at our expense. It’s weaponized in other words. Also much of it has become obscene and scatological. It’s a big subject – I don’t always know exactly where to draw the lines nor do I always stay within them I suppose. But lines there must be.

When Sandra Bernhardt said she wanted Sarah Palin to come to New York and get raped by some her “Black Brothers” the Liberal and Jewish audience roared. Was it a joke? I think that’s exactly what she wanted. But she paid for that since many women don’t think rape is a joke – except rape of men of course. Her gig at a women’s shelter in Boston was cancelled. She tried the old apologizing without apologizing but I doubt if anyone took her seriously.

Humor is a complex psychological phenomena. Did you ever ask yourself what exactly it is? I don’t know either, but oh how we enjoy it. But it turns nasty very quickly. I think we can all agree on that. And kids get their politics from John Stewart and Colbert now. That’s not good. You have to be Very conscious to enjoy humor yet stop before it goes bad. We are a Fallen Race, quick to evil. And in no part of us it this more evident than in our laughter.

You are intelligent, somewhat spiritual and somewhat religious, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how you could end up being so prejudiced. Doesn’t the Christian religions tell us to turn the other cheek?

Sandra’s slur was because Palin is a symbol of White Christians. And of course, Liberals hate us too, but Jews did first. And Sandra is or at least was on a big Kabbalah trip saying hands off my Torah with your funky religion – as if she was living by Torah standards.

Oh and yeah, there was the little thing about the Jews crucifying Christ. And then being the hit men against Christians in the Roman Empire.

Btw I don’t think Palin is too smart or at least not Aware. But I support her against the Hate. Bashir couldn’t resist and he got fired. Yea Team.

Thank you for that disclaimer, because yes, it is a guess and a wild one at that.

What part of circulation do you not understand? There is money supply, and then there’s the amount of that supply that’s in circulation, meaning available to the plebs to purchase the necessities, or otherwise, of life. QE did not increase the amount of money in circulation, but in fact decreased the amount it while increasing the overall money supply. That excess supply has increasingly been used by financial institutions to speculate, and equities/commodities are the perfect venue for that, although as we’ve witnessed lately, creative debt instruments are equally as speculative thus blurring the effective line between debt and equity.

It’s quite possible that with the announcement of QE tapering and holding interest rates low, the Great Rotation I referred to earlier in this thread is kicking into gear, and hence the substantial uptick in the equity indices signaling it has begun.

Thank you for the explanation. I agree with you. QE was supposed to increase the plebeian money supply by loosening up credit but that did not happen and now that the overall money supply has been increased inflation will result at a level greater than what would have been the case had there been no QE. With the onset of inflation the economy will recess and another round of QE will be attempted because the taper will be misperceived as the problem. As you say we’ve witnessed lately, creative debt instruments are equally as speculative.

Fundamentals have not been addressed and trouble must inevitably result. Anyway my guess was appropriate as the question was asked to explain this:

Pretty soon, we’ll get the un-taper, the final surrender to the crack-up boom that awaits before the western world has to go medieval.

I tried to explain it, you did not. And my guess therefore, is after all, not so wild.

Wage is an excellent thinker and delights in a boisterous argument. We had many of those on CFN. Yet she was always honorable and straightforward and never trolled the thread simply to piss people off or just to hear herself type.

Thank you, Prog. I love Wage like a Dog loves a Cat or I love Ice Cream. I just want to eat her up! This is how the demons in The Screwtape Letters talk. I have to be careful. But to her credit, she was down with it, boisterous and tough. I really do love women like that. Obviously I could never have a real life relationship with an ardent Marxist Maiden, but I could online. Most women aren’t like that and I try to respect that. I never talked to the other ladies that way because they aren’t built for that kind of repartee. SJ once got offended on her behalf and Wage defended me. Priceless.

Doth protest too much. You know I know she has her own website and know I have left comments on it. In that week you decided to be her mouthpiece I left a comment saying she had her own website and invited others to visit it.

This is your comment:

progress2conserve | February 21, 2012 11:10 PM

WageLaborer sent me an email earlier today with this message:

“Hi Prog,
I wrote your email down a long time ago, in case I ever needed it.

I got banned from Kunstler. WTF? Why me?

The Chinese spammer, old69 and Vlad carry on, but I am denied.
Anyway, if you could let the others know, I’d appreciate it.
Thanks,
wage”

Truly a weird and undeserved banning, I think any of us would agree – even WSP and Q!
===================
OK, now back to your regularly scheduled Clusters of F*ckages.

And this is mine:

k-dog | February 23, 2012 4:49 PM

While WageLaborer and others can’t post here right now she does have her own blog. You can even leave a comment.

Same week. The article was “The Choices We Make”

You misrepresent the facts and have called me paranoid and insulted me. I’m a better dog than you because if I am going to insult someone I’m going to make damn sure that I have my facts right before I do it. I don’t appreciate being made the fool even if the attempt was pathetic.

You say:

Because I’ve watched you begin to manifest a pretty serious case of it over the last several months.

Ok lets be clear. I’m convinced you are a government troll. You have given me evidence to support my position. We are not friends. Wagelaborer made a farewell post which I read and it has been lost and I think you know all about it. Say I am mentally unstable all you wish. I don’t care. Don’t bother asking me for the ‘evidence’ that proved to me you are a government troll. I am not here to ‘out you’ or to prove my sanity to you or anyone else. I’m here for genuine dialogue and I emphasize the genuine.

When wage was here she even thought I was a government troll sometimes and accused me of it. She on more than one occasion equated you with Vlad who is now know as Janos who she hated with great and deserved passion. The idea that she would trust you to be her mouthpiece is ludicrous.

WageLaborer is a real human being and I know who she is. She has run for congress as a green party candidate in Illinois. Googling her to find out who she is, no great feat. I also have put out enough information that I can be identified. Such is the case with real people who have nothing to hide.

No, she never equated us. She hated me and liked Prog. Now and then she got a chuckle out of my antics. I have no illusions about my fate if she became Supreme Soviet. She hated Back Row more because he was more of a good Ol Boy. She used to time them when they signed in at the hospital.

Have you read the Black Book of Communism yet? The evil your ideas lead to is unspeakable.

Continuing with my possible brush with abduction from my youth story, I didn’t spell out the moral of it, if there is a moral.

I crossed the street after he slowly pulled away while judiciously exercising my peripheral vision and keenly focused hearing to ensure he continued in that direction. After crossing, I feigned as though I was going to where I said I lived until he was well out of sight, and then I made a mad dash for home and didn’t breath easier until I was behind the locked doors of my abode. I never said anything to anyone about it, and certainly never reported it. I didn’t get the license number of the car, so even if I did report it, more than likely nothing would have come of it. But my primal instinct told me that had I gotten in that car, I wouldn’t have come home. He would have killed me and most likely my body would never have been found. I would have been a sad statistic; yet one more missing child.

But let’s suppose I did get the license plate and I told my parents and they contacted the police and decided to press charges. Primal instinct is not admissible as evidence, so absent that, this guy could claim he was just trying to be a good person, a good Samaritan; offering me a warm ride home and sheltering me from the cold, bitter air. He could have easily cast doubt on suspicion of his intent let alone shadows of that doubt. There would be no way to prove the intent of this predator; that he was trying to lure me to my certain, cold, bitter death at his hands. And so, this one incident reveals the many dimensions of doubt. I doubted the sincerity of his entreaties to me and he in turn, if charges were brought, could have cast doubt on assertions that his intent was anything other than what he stated it was; a kind gesture.

What’s most unnerving of all about this formative event in my life is that I’m left with the lingering horror of knowing this person most likely succeeded with some of his prey, and more than likely, some who were faced with the same situation that I was, have been missing for all these years while this creature still walks the Earth without being held to account. He could even frequent discussion forums and defend fellow predators; comrades in arms who can sense one another and form an unacknowledged, yet implicit fellowship of sorts, always offering support when one of their own is chastised for their transgressions.

“Ok lets be clear. I’m convinced you are a government troll. You have given me evidence to support my position. We are not friends. Wagelaborer made a farewell post which I read and it has been lost and I think you know all about it.” ….k-dog….

First, let’s take a look at the situation in Wage’s own words and Mika’s own words, from Wage’s own blog comment section:

“Blogger Methuselah said…
Hi Wage,
Haven’t heard from you lately at CFN. I hope all is well. (snip)
March 11, 2012 at 4:32 PM

Blogger wagelaborer said…
Hey! Thanks, mika.
I guess you missed the part where I was banished from CFN. I told Prog about it and he posted it. (snip)
March 11, 2012 at 11:05 PM

Blogger Metuselah said…
I just don’t believe Mr. K. intentionally banned you. I think it has more to do with his software. Just log in with a different handle.
March 14, 2012 at 5:43 PM”

And, K-dog, I wasn’t saying you were paranoid as an insult. I’m no psychologist, but maybe I can help you a little bit, here.

I am not a government troll. I’m just not. And I never have been.

So – every piece of “evidence” you have for that is simply manufactured in your own mind. (Unless, some other person is using me to “get” to you – which seems unlikely.)

I’ve been posting to CFN since the Macondo well blow-out in the Gulf. Needing to vent about that, and peak oil generally, is what brought me to CFN. That’s a long history of posting and a lot of personal thought and details. WHY would a government troll go to that much trouble? Especially since most of my posts essentially support JHK’s body of work AND the collapse/peak everything theme?

And you imply that I should have a blog, and have my personal information splayed all over the internet to prove I’m a “real person” with “nothing to hide.” Well, sorry, I’m not going to do that. I’ve posted my email address to CFN a couple of times, and that’s as far as I’m going to go. You can write me and I’ll write you back. I’ll even call you, if you’ll give me your phone number.

And anyway – what would there to be to stop a government troll from creating an entire online identity – complete with blogs and family photos – to trick the non-paranoid?

Which means that if I’m a female, 20-something Federal agent with a Canadian accent – I would ALSO have the voice synthesizing equipment to make myself sound, on the phone, like a middle-aged male with a Southern accent, so as to match my CFN “posting persona.”

Good work on Lord Blaby. His Wikipedia page is very interesting. You have rendered a service to the community once again. That being said, you do just make things up in your mind without realizing it. Confabulation in other words. A mindfulness type meditation practice might help you see when you are doing it – and help with the paranoid feelings. And again, that doesn’t mean you are wrong about everything. That’s why I prefaced this with praise. Paranoid people can have real enemies.

The Christmas Spirit is in high gear, ‘specially in our cities. I don’t know how many people have been shot and stabbed so far this weekend in Hartford and New Haven, at least a half dozen. Down in the south end of Hartford a woman garrotted her boyfriend to death then called police to report a case of spousal abuse. Another way to celebrate the birth of Jesus and the winter equinox is to set your neighbors house on fire — this is popular with our fellow citizens from the West Indies.

White Liberal punks herself. I love it! White Pride is repressed and like all repressions comes out inappropriately. So we have a contradiction, a binary, a thesis and antithesis. So what is the solution, the ternary, the synthesis? Do we go down and crack down on Whites and White Culture even more? Or do we go up and allow Whites to feel pride again – as all healthy peoples do?

@ Lord Blaby said: “He could even frequent discussion forums and defend fellow predators; comrades in arms who can sense one another and form an unacknowledged, yet implicit fellowship of sorts, always offering support when one of their own is chastised for their transgressions.”

=============

Lord, you don’t know how close you are. Or maybe you do. Your instinct appears to have happened upon a ring of sorts. It would explain why no one has expressed any interest in your latest line of research and has instead changed the subject, ignored you, or attacked you. Please feel comforted in the fact that we are aware and are on the case. Keep sleuthing. We need more upstanding citizens like you on the case if we’re to put a stop to the epidemic predation. As for Janos, well let’s just say birds of a feather flock together.

I saw that Sacco story, Janos. My first thought was that she had a background in genetics – and her tweet was misunderstood.

” The researchers found that a genetic trait — found in 60 percent of African-Americans and 90 percent of Africans — makes HIV infection 40 percent more likely. The trait is virtually nonexistent in whites.”

Also apparently the Black Plague inoculated some Whites – especially in hard hit areas like England.

I noticed you slipped into the hard facts in order to avoid the deep truth I presented about White guilt. Excellent misdirection. I was referring to Dave, but you too have come under the influence of Baphomet.

What the Duck Dynasty thing shows there is small but powerful elite of cultural marxists, and they are determined to shut down free speech and debate in this country. Everyone is being forced to spout some party line in public or risk being fired or worse. Here the issue was homosexuality, and apparently the Soviet style apparatcheks have decided that there will absolutely no criticism of the anal retentive crowd What we’re losing is democracy as the country more and more resembles North Korea or some other third world place run by lunatics…

Check out this quote by Theodore Dalyrmple. It explains everything in paragraph.

Theodore Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

I was a bank examiner in the late 90’s into the early 2000’s. The training for this job was exhaustive, and included some history of the US banking system and its past foibles, along with the regulatory “fixes” assigned after each. Even as a relatively young lad I remember thinking how flimsy and knee-jerk this whole system seemed. I left that job and opened my own business a few years before the wheels came off everything in ’08, and I’ve reflected many times since how I wish I could’ve been a bank examiner during those much more interesting times, and a small business owner during the previous period of relative prosperity. Such is life I suppose. Now, I’ve decided the old adage “if you can’t beat ‘em”….and currently work for a hedge fund. But all these new rules certainly smack of the old knee-jerk regulatory response to calamity. And while JHK asserts that Glass-Steagall kept everything copacetic in the banking industry for 66 years, I must beg to differ, as there was this little thing of “the S&L crisis” precipitated by speculative commercial construction funded by greedy and inattentive bankers….but I digress. As much as things change is as much as they stay the same…

[…] From his website: “… As American manufacturing was surrendered to other countries, there were fewer productive ventures for capital to be directed into. What remained was real estate development (a.k.a. suburban sprawl) and finance, which was the enabler of it. Finance ballooned to 40 percent of the US economy and the American landscape got trashed. The computer revolution of the 1990s stimulated tremendous “innovation” in financial activities. Much of that innovation turned out to be new species of swindles and frauds. Now you understand the history of the so-called “housing bubble” and the crash of 2008. The US never recovered from it, and all the rescue attempts in the form of bail-outs, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, have turned into rackets aimed at papering-over this national failure to thrive. It is all ultimately linked to the larger story of industrialism and its relationship with the unique, finite, fossil fuel resources that the human race got cheaply for a few hundred years. That story is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.” […]

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Too Much Magic

Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

The nationally best-selling author of "The Long Emergency" expands on his alarming argument that our oil-addicted, technology-dependent society is on the brink of collapse—that the long emergency has already begun. Published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.